Animat was born on 11 January. That was the day Versace's team hooked up its brain, which is made up of hundreds of neural models - for colour vision, motor function and anxiety, among others - all of which are faithful imitations of biology.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Learning machines: The education of an animat: He and the rest of the team seized on these advances to "cheat" at embodiment. Instead of toiling over a real body, they built a virtual one, whose synthetic sensors would interact with a painstakingly rendered virtual environment (IEEE Computer, vol 44, p 21). This way, they reasoned, they could reap all the advantages of embodied AI with none of the drawbacks. If it worked, they would be able to hit fast-forward on the evolution of an embodied intelligence.