PUBLIC MARKS with tags mind & 2006

In his book Out of Control, author Kevin Kelley describes a Las Vegas conference room where a crowd of 5000, led by Pixar co-founder and Rescue on Fractalus co-creator Loren Carpenter, learn to adapt and react as a hive mind as they play a game of 2500 on 2500 Pong. Each half of the auditorium took collective control of each side, registering their individual intent to move in a certain direction with the wand. The input led to a computer, which averaged and relayed the moves to the game, with initially disastrous but eventually workable results.

Perception is a fundamentally underconstrained problem. You get information in through your senses, but not enough information to be absolutely sure of what is causing those sensations. A good example is perception of depth in vision. You get a pattern of light falling on your retinas (retinae?), in two dimensions, and from that you infer a three dimensional world, using various clever calculations of the visual system and some assumptions about what is likely. But because the process remains fundamentally underconstrained, there is always the possibility that you will see something that isn't really there - that is, your visual system will take in a pattern of information and decide that it is more likely to be produced by a scenario different from the real one.

This is part four of five in my series on programming logic games. This week's game is Mind Rover, a commercial game which came out in the late 90s. Mind Rover is a fun and challenging game in which you build and program a rover to complete one of the many the scenarios. The scenarios range from winning a race to defeating an opponent rover in battle.

The International Robot Exhibition concluded recently in Japan, where the world's robot manufacturers displayed their most advanced and, in some cases, human-like creations.