Thursday, July 2, 2015

Seeing the moon in the daytime

Children (and some older people) often think that you can only see the moon at night.  I suspect this is simply a strong association between having seen the moon many times and having it always been dark at the time.
 In one of my Lego NXT robot experiments Asa H learned to strongly associate "wall"/"immovable boundary" with the color yellow (sensor reading 6).  The walls of the environment I was operating the robot in just happened to be yellow but Asa concluded that this was very important.  This kind of thing would not even occur in a simulation where walls have no color. (at least in my simulations to date)
Simulations alone are important but they are not enough.  An AI must have some contact with the real world.  How much contact is needed and how direct that contact must be is an open question.

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