Building Toy Robots

from the career-choices dept

An NY Times article about the guy who came up with the idea for BIO bots, the cheap little behavioral robot toys that learn to adapt based on behavioral clues (as opposed to having stuff programmed into them). We've spoken about BIO bots before, but it doesn't sound like they have much of a future. The guy is a little annoyed because he thinks they could have done so much more with them, but he was held back by Hasbro. He wanted to set them up so they were hackable to get kids interested in building their own AI and robotic systems. However, Hasbro thought that competitors would just reverse engineer them. In the end, the BIO bug robots did okay - but not well enough to let the guy create the next generation (which he says would have been much better). There's also some interesting stuff about the difference between behavioral AI using simpler neural networks, and the approach most robotics folks take of pushing more and more computing power into electronic brains.

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