From: Joel Pitt (joel.pitt@gmail.com)
Date: Tue May 02 2006 - 00:06:15 MDT
On 4/29/06, Russell Wallace <russell.wallace@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/28/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> wrote:
> > I've seen a robot that balances in 2 dimensions on two legs, and runs
> > amazingly fast in a remarkable imitation of human runners, using 20
> > neurons.
>
> A real robot in a realistic environment, or just a laboratory environment
> or a simulation?
>
Balancing in 2 dimensions with two legs is easy, just like making a
tripod balance in 3 dimensions is easy. And making a wireframe model
imitate a human runner is also easy - but getting that same model to
run over a irregular 3d terrain while carrying a swinging weight (like
a shopping bag) starts to get tricky.
>Falls are consistently the leading cause of injury-producing
>accidents. They account for more than 1 million injuries each year in
>the United States.
I'd say that is a pretty low error rate considering the amount of time
we spend running around on two legs (although with all the media hype
about Americans being obese I sometimes wonder...). Apparently the USA
has 295 million people - so roughly 1 in 300 people have an injury
from falling every year. Not much at all.
-Joel.
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