Coffee Cup Half Moons

It just occurred to me that other than astrophysics and/or particle physics (which really just interest me more than fit me), the most logical field to get into is robotics.  The New York times published an article today about Watson, a supercomputer built by IBM that can converse with you.  I got to thinking about it, after reading the article, and it seems to me we are looking at robotics the wrong way.

We constantly refer to “complex human language,” but realistically, it is rather simple, it’s just had millions of years of evolution to refine and set up natural exception handling.  All we do mentally is perceive, compare, catalog, and reconstitute — all things we can easily make a computer do.  What’s hard coded in us, however, is our need to survive and our drive to properly mimic (beginning with the actions and language of our parents).  I believe very strongly that all of this can be programmed into a very simple “blank-slate” machine with “senses,” a movable “body,” and a need to understand will nearly immediately become a human-sparked variation of the natural phenomenon we know as biological life.

And so, since robotics really seems to blend my interests of mathematics, computers, and languages (and even the physics of electricity), it’s a natural field for me to embrace.  Perhaps one day when my bloggy pontifications make me rich.

Feel free to chuckle.  🙂