jaw@ames-lm.UUCP (07/06/84)
# "God sends meat, and the Devil sends cooks." -- John Taylor, Works [1630]
Here is a quote from Computer Currents, a local trade newspaper,
under the byline of Wendy Woods (no relation):
"Meanwhile, a Stanford University scientist is attempting to program
a robot to cook Beef Wellington. Professor Brian Reid has racked up
60 pages of instructions just to tell the robot how to find and slice beef.
He gave up when he became bogged down. 'It was when I had to tell the robot
how to wrap the beef in pastry ... I decided to go to bed.' He's also
discovered that 'a lot of cooking is reading BETWEEN the lines.'"
[Note: Reid authored SCRIBE, is a wine connoisseur, likes to bust UNIX
system crackers (see recent issue of California), and submits stuff to
fa.laser-lovers.] Now, cooking has always been more of a tactile and visual
feedback process rather than an intellectual endeavor. Given the general
agreement that the cerebral (chess, medical diagnosis, etc.) is easy for AI
but the physical (juggling, driving a car) is not, why Mr. Reid would try
to make a rule base for such a thing seems a bit premature. On the other
hand, sushi-making robots in Japan are old hat.
-----------------(net.cooks may stop here)------------
This reminds me of a lecture given years ago by a linguistics prof
at U. C. Berkeley (J. Matisoff, I believe), who, to impress students about
the underlying knowledge base for language, dared his audience to
give a verbal ALGORITHM FOR TYING SHOES. Folks would throw instructions
at him; he'd follow them blindly, interpreting fuzziness and ambiguity
freely, and as a consequence, could not successfully tie a shoe. I've
always regarded this as a decent "robot benchmark", sort of a "physical
Turing test", and probably just as tough.
-- James A. Woods {dual,hplabs,hao}!ames-lm!jaw (jaw@riacs.ARPA)
"A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat,
A careless shoestring, in whose tie,
I see a wild civility,
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part."
-- Robert Herrick, from Delight in Disorder, Hesperides [1648]
P.S.
Anyone know how the Marilyn Monroe robot in Japan is coming along?
I hear they have the guitar playing (stiff) and the breast heaving (pneumatic)
down, but are having trouble with subtler effects, as well as realistic soft
plastics technology. Great strides in robotics will probably be underwritten
by rich perverts.