Android Bodies

In another post I blogged about how a humanoid robot (sometimes called an android) could be built. I divided the task into three parts, the robot's body, brain (or computer) and its programming (intelligence). In this article I'd like to get into more detail about what is required to design and build the android's body.

First it needs a power supply. At present this is likely to be chargeable batteries. Other possible sources could be compressed gases, hydraulics, flywheel energy, the decay of organic material, nuclear fusion, when and if it ever becomes available, or other radioactive sources, solar energy, etc. For the purpose of a man-like frame, many of these possibilities are either too bulky or too complicated.

The next thing we need to think about are actuators which are the parts that convert the stored energy into movements. In humans and animals it is muscles that do this job. At present most robotic actuators are electric motors which turn a wheel at a joint. A spring can be part of the motor actuator for improved force control, particularly needed for walking. Another method is to use wire that contracts and expands when electricity is applied and released. This would work similarly to muscles in a human being. New plastic materials that expand and contract have been used in facial muscles and arms of animatronic (humanoid appearing) robots.

One big problem to be solved is a sense of touch. A humanoid robot must be capable of determining how much pressure to apply with its hands to grasp items properly. Current robotic and prosthetic hands receive far less tactile information than the human hand. Recent research has developed a tactile sensor array that mimics the mechanical properties and touch receptors of human fingertips.

Another important sense is vision. Our android must be capable of recognizing and distinguishing between objects and of estimating their relationship to each other. There is an entire subfield of artificial intelligence concerned with designing systems that mimic the processing and behavior of biological systems.

Another difficult problem to solve is walking. Several robots have been made which can walk reliably on two legs. However, none have ever been built that are as robust as a human being. Some have said that Sony's robot Asimov walks as though it had to use the toilet. Nonetheless, several robots built by Marc Albert of MIT have successfully demonstrated very dynamic walking, even running and performing somersaults.

Speech recognition is a requirement if the humanoid robot is going to interact with human beings. Interpreting a continuous flow of sounds coming from a human in real time is a difficult task. Sometimes we don't understand each other when one has a different accent than he or she normally is used to. Currently the best systems can recognize continuous natural speech up to 160 words per minute with an accuracy of ninety-five percent.

There are many other design considerations. The ones I have listed are the most difficult to achieve.

Artificial Intelligence

In many science fiction stories, there are electromechanical devices, robots and computers who are at least as smart as human beings and sometimes smarter. But, what is the reality? Is it possible to build a machine that "thinks" as well or better than a human being? Or is this simply an impossible dream and will never happen? If artificial intelligence (abbreviated AI) is possible, how close are the computers of today towards that goal?

Like most questions of this sort, it depends upon the definition of artificial intelligence. There is no consensus even within the AI scientific community. Elaine Rich in her book, Artificial Intelligence, defines it this way: "Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better." One good example of something that fits this definition is chess playing. Once it was thought that people who played darn good chess were such geniuses that no machine could ever beat them. Perhaps they are. But in 1997 the supercomputer Deep Blue beat the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov. Nonetheless, chess aside, Gary Kasparov can do many things that Deep Blue cannot. A chess program go only do one thing well, and that is play chess. It is like an idiot savant.

A better definition of what we would expect from an AI is as follows: "Artificial intelligence is the part of computer science concerned with designing intelligent computer systems, that is, systems that exhibit the characteristics we associate with intelligence in human behavior." This quote is from Avron Barr and Edward A. Feigenbaum's book, The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence. But what are these characteristics? In the book, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Hofstadter gives the following "essential abilities for intelligence" (by the way, I highly recommend this book, which is entertaining as well as informative):

Ÿ "To respond to situations very flexibly."

Ÿ "To make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages."

Ÿ "To recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation."

Ÿ "To find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them."

Ÿ "To draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them."

The problem is that the abilities, such as those listed above, that are easy for human beings, are very difficult to program into a computer. Nonetheless, progress has been made. Some areas of research where machine intelligence has come a long way are:

Expert Systems: Software designed to act as an expert in a particular area of expertise, for example, an income tax consultant. I happen to use one of these every year to do my taxes and believe me, it's a lot better than trying to make sense of the U.S. Tax Code yourself.

Natural Language Processing: Software that understands and/or generates a natural language such as English. Translation software also fits into this category. I have more to say on this subject below.

Speech Recognition: Hardware and software that understands human speech. I've noticed that lately that many automatic phone answering services now use this technology.

Computer Vision: Hardware and software that can interpret visual images.

Robotics: A robot is a machine that can perform manual tasks that previously were performed by a human being, such as vacuuming a rug or assembling automobiles or dancing. I have Rhomba vacuum which does a tolerable job, but sometimes get stuck under low hung furniture.

Computer Assisted Instruction: Teaching machines. This was kind a fad for a while, but doesn't seem to be used much anymore.

Automatic Programming: Software that can create other software.

Planning and Decision Support: Software that aids planning.

Expert Systems

"An expert system is a class of computer programs developed by researchers in artificial intelligence. In essence, they are made up of a set of rules that analyze information (usually supplied by the user of the system) about a specific class of problems, as well as provide analysis of the problem(s), and, depending upon their design, recommend a course of user action in order to implement corrections."

I got this definition from Wikipedia in an article that gives a good introductory explanation of this branch of artificial intelligence. For a deeper understanding what is meant by an expert system, you may want to read the article. I'll try to summarize as briefly as I can.

The idea behind expert systems is to provide help usually provided by an expert in a particular field, such as software troubleshooting or diagnosing an illness in a medical patient. Three features of expert systems are rules of thumb, fuzzy logic and a data base of solutions. When an expert in a field, such a physician, goes about solving a problem, such a determining what ails a patient, he or she usually has several rules-of-thumb that he or she uses. Depending upon the answers to key questions about the problem, the expert knows what the solution is by applying a rule of thumb. For example, suppose a patient complains about frequent severe headaches. After asking questions about the headaches and other accompanying symptoms and perhaps performing some tests, the doctor may determine that the person is suffering from migraines and prescribe pills. In expert systems, these rules of thumb are coded into the software.

Fuzzy logic is logic based on approximations rather than formal logic. It takes into account such vague statements as "almost," "nearly," and so forth, and manipulates them to come up with an approximate answer. For example, if a patient asks how much pain he or she is in and replies "not so much," this is considered less pain than "it hurts terribly." Certain conclusion may be drawn by which answer is given.

Expert systems also usually have large data bases which can be readily accessed using the rules of thumb and fuzzy logic.

Anyone who has gone to a software web site and used their self troubleshooting system has used an expert system. Computer and video games also use expert systems.

In my novel, The Isaac Project (available at Renaissance Pageturner Editions, http://www.pageturnereditions.com), the core software of the artificial intelligence being developed is an expert system.

Natural Language Processing

If you were going to design a humanoid robot, one of the most important abilities it must have is the ability to understand human speech, at least to the point where it could understand the commands you give it. It would also be nice if it would talk back to you. To be able to communicate with your computer in a normal conversational way would also be a good thing. You may have also noticed that lately, when you call certain businesses, you don't necessarily have to press buttons to enter information to their automated answering systems. Some allow you to speak the required information. All these artificial intelligence tasks fall under the province of natural language processing. Other tasks that require natural language processing are translation from one human language to another, transforming text to speech, answering questions, and retrieving information.

Natural language processing is the study and software development associated with the automatic generation and understanding of natural human languages. Natural language generation software converts information from computer data bases into normal human language. Natural language understanding software converts human language into forms that a computer can understand and manipulate.

One of the earliest systems, called SHRDLU, used a restricted world of blocks. It used a small restricted vocabulary to manipulate blocks of different shapes and sizes on a computer monitor screen. Because it worked extremely well, researchers were excessively optimistic about developing natural language software. However, it turned out that in the real world, language processing was much more difficult than supposed.

Some of the problems are: Ambiguity. For example when it is not clear which word in a sentence an adjective or adverb is modifying. Some strings of words can be interpreted in many ways. In spoken words, sounds that represent successive letters blend into each other. Some written languages, such as Chinese and Thai, do not signal word boundaries. Most words have several meanings. The grammar for natural languages is ambiguous. Typing errors, speech irregularities and OCR errors. Some sentences don't literally mean what they say.

Many of these problems have been partially or wholly solved, but artificial intelligence experts still have a long way to go before you can have an intelligent conversation with your computer or friendly robot.

I note with interest the various web sites with talking heads called chatbots. I urge you to visit one of these sites to learn what a natural language artificial intelligence artifact can do. A popular one is called The ALICE Chatbot Foundation.

Isaac Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics

In Science Fiction, the Three Laws of Robotics are a set of three rules written by Isaac Asimov, which most robots that appear in his fiction must obey. Introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround," the Laws state the following:

A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

If we could actually build robots who are intelligent enough to be self-aware, would these laws actually make sense. I propose not. Take the first law. In the first place, how could the robot tell a human being from another robot that looked like a human being or from a hologram of a human being. You might say, so what. As long as the robot cannot harm a human being or anything that resembles a human being, that is all to the good. But what if a humanoid robot or hologram and a real human being are both in danger. How would the robot know which one to save? As far as that goes, if two human beings are in danger at the same time, how does a robot know which one to save. (Note: this exact situation is shown in the movie I, Robot. In the movie the robot made the wrong choice.)

For certain uses, a manufacturer would not want to apply the Laws in that order. For example, suppose the robots are to be used for military purposes. In this case, the Laws built into the robot might go something like this:

A robot must obey the orders given to it by his superior officer.

A robot must protect its own existence, and those of other soldier robot, except where such orders conflict with the First Law.

A robot may only harm those human beings or robots designated as "The Enemy," by its superior officer and only if not under a flag of truce, surrendering or designated as "Prisoners of War."

In my novel, The Isaac Project, the situation of the military wanting to change the Three Laws provides part of the conflict in the book.

One error that Isaac Asimov made was that he assumed that the intelligence of the robot would somehow be in its electronic circuitry. Actually, we know now that the intelligence of a robot would more likely be in its software. This changes the situation quite a bit, since software can have errors in it that are not always detected during testing. Also, it can be modified. Depending upon how the software is installed, it might be subjected to viruses, worms, and other sorts of malicious software tricks by unscrupulous hackers, such as our computers are now.

Apocalypse in Science Fiction

One of the most reoccurring themes in science fiction is the end of the world, or at least the end of civilization. It is not surprising since there are many ways that this could actually come about. Also, prophets have been predicting catastrophic disasters from the time men learned to speak to each other. Two popular ones lately are global warming and an asteroid strike. So we have a choice of drowning when the ice caps melt or being smashed to atoms by a big rock.

For a while, when a few people caught bird flu in Asia, pandemics were all the rage. In the latter half of the twentieth century, everyone was betting on an all-out atomic war, but that fizzled when the cold war ended. Recently, I read article about a scientist who said we could all die from a burst of gamma ray radiation from a nearby supernova explosion. As the clock struck midnight ushering in the year 2000, all the computers were supposed go mad because they only had the last two digits of the year and could not distinguish between the twentieth and twenty-first century (which to some people did not start until 2001 anyway.)

Anyway, science fiction authors love to write about Armageddon of one sort or other. Here are some of my personal favorites. There are two by John Brunner. The first is Stand on Zanzibar where civilization is brought to an end because of overpopulation. Overpopulation as threat seems to be no longer in vogue. I guess because there are so many ways of dealing with overpopulation. For example, nuke the excess or give everybody a gun and give them leave to hunt and kill everybody they hate.

The second book by Brunner is The Sheep Look Up which is about pollution. We are pretty certain that is the most likely end that we face.

There are many atomic war novels. These were especially popular during the cold war years. The funniest was the movie Doctor Strangelove, where a deranged general starts world war three because of his erectile dysfunction. I also like the novel On the Beach by Nevil Schute, which was also made into a good movie. In this novel, the last people on earth after an atomic war are living in Australia waiting to die from the radioactivity produced by all those hydrogen bombs going off. Probably my all time favorite about a post apocalyptic world is Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller where a monk finds an artifact from our civilization after civilization has gone back to the dark ages.

One of the more interesting ways that the human race comes to an end is a little known book called The Black Corridor by Michael Moorcock. In this short novel, bigotry runs wild so that everyone kills everyone else that is different from himself or herself. It's a real chiller. I got goose bumps reading it.

Invasions by aliens is another possibility that could end the human race. My favorite is Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, where the invaders look like elephants.

An old movie that's fun is When Worlds Collide where a group of scientists and a chosen few race to build a spaceship to escape from a collusion between earth and another planet. The one thing I never quite understood was where the planet they were headed for was located

I liked the TV miniseries The Stand by Stephen King as the survivors of a pandemic meet up at the cabin of an old woman and go fight the devil in Las Vegas.

Of course there are many more great science fiction novels and stories about the Apocalypse, but those were some of my personal favorites, because they each have a slightly odd slant to the end of the world.

I have written one novel about Armageddon myself. It is called Morgaine and Armageddon and has a lot of stuff in it based loosely on The Book of Revelations of the Christian Bible.

Faster than Light Travel

One of the most prevalent themes in science fiction is the galactic empire. Star Wars and Star Trek (and all their spin-offs) take place in a galactic empire; Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is about the decline and fall of a galactic empire. My own novel Pawns of Tomorrow and its sequel Knights of Tomorrow are about a galactic empire based on a chess game. While writing these stories, I did research about our own Milky Way galaxy. What I found out was that a galaxy is a hell of a big place.

To illustrate: The NASA space probe Voyager 2, traveling at approximately 93,000 mph, took twelve years to travel to Neptune. If this same space vehicle were to travel to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, it would take it over 370 years to reach it. Okay, but that's reality. Let's assume that we have a starship capable of faster than light travel (impossible according to some scientists). How much faster? Let's say it can reach Proxima Centauri (4.22 lightyears away) in four days. Pretty fast huh. That's one lightyear a day or fifteen lightdays per hour. Okay, now let's say we want to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. The galaxy has an estimated diameter of 100,000 lightyears. The trip would take 100,000 days or almost 3,000 years.

In galactic terms, 100 lightyears or even a 1000 lightyears is in the neighborhood. As a result, even with FLT (faster than light) speeds, our empire could not be very large. Even then, travel from one star to another would take a lot of time, a hundred days (over three months) to go to a stellar system a hundred lightyears away, a thousand days (over three years) to go to a system a thousand lightyears away.

But interstellar travel may not be possible. As mentioned above, the speed of light (186,000 miles a second) is supposed to be a cosmic speed limit. But is it really? Under the special theory of relativity, a slower-than-light particle with nonzero rest mass needs infinite energy to accelerate to the speed of light, although special relativity does not forbid the existence of particles that travel faster than light at all times.

Some physicists think that unusually distorted regions of space-time might permit matter to reach distant locations faster than what it would take light in the normal or undistorted space-time. This would allow a starship to travel long distances a faster than light speeds through a wormhole, if such things exist or could be manufactured.

My own thoughts about this cosmic speed limit (which doesn't mean much) is that perhaps it is an illusion. Here's why I say this. Let's say that my spaceship accelerates to some speed where relativistic effects are supposed to occur. I measure the speed of light; it is still 186,000 miles a second. I measure the length of my spaceship in the direction of travel. It has not changed. Now, according to the theory of relativity, my friend on earth has equipment for measuring my spaceship. His measurements show that my spaceship has shrunk in the direction of travel and that my mass has increased.

On the other hand, since from my point-of-view it is the earth that is moving away from my spaceship at near light speed. (Einstein postulates that there is no absolute frame of reference. This is why it is called the Theory of Relativity. All measurements are relative to the location of the observer.) So, I take the same measurements and find that it is the earth that is shorter and has more mass. Hence, I see no reason why I cannot accelerate my spaceship more. I would really like a refutation of my premise. Please free to comment.

The Buzzard Ramjet

As I pointed out in a previous post, the stars are very far away. Astronomers use light-years as a unit of measurement of the distance between stars. Since light travels at 186,000 miles per second, a light-year is 586, 569, 600, 000 miles. The nearest star is around four light years away, 2, 346, 278, 400, 000 miles. The fastest current spacecraft can travel at 158, 000 mph. It would take over 1600 years for it to reach the nearest star. Does such distances mean that spacecraft human or robotic will never launched to another star system? It does seem daunting. But technologies have been proposed which might make such a trip possible.

In 1960, Robert Bussard, a physicist suggested a spacecraft designed as shown in the illustration. The way that it would work is that the scoop in the front takes in hydrogen which is fed to a nuclear fusion reactor to supply a high-speed exhaust. In this manner the vehicle would avoid having to carry a large amount of fuel which would add to its mass. A typical region of interstellar space contains about one atom per centimeter.

The Buzzard Ramjet as it is called has major problems as far as implementation with our present technology. One is that the scoop would need a frontal collecting area of 10,000 square kilometers. A 10, 000 km² scoop made of the thinnest Mylar would weigh 250, 000 tons. One way around this problem is to ionize the hydrogen ahead of the spacecraft using a powerful laser, allowing a relatively small collector which generates a powerful magnet. In this manner the scoop could be mesh. However, there are additional problems. For additional details, see David Darlings Interstellar Encyclopedia. It also suggests possible solutions.

Another web site with good explanation of the Buzzard ramjet is Nation Master Encyclopedia. In this article is says that spacecraft accelerating at 10 m/sec² could reach 77% of light speed in one year. Once it reached that speed, propulsion would no longer be need until it approached its destination, at which time it would need to decelerate.

Seattle Science Fiction Museum

My daughter lives in Seattle, Washington. One of my favorite things to do when I visit her is to go to the Seattle Center, which contains a science museum, the space needle, an IMAX theater and above all the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. The fun starts even as you approach the building, which looks as though it was built by aliens. Also, if you arrive by monorail, the track goes through the building.

The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame is one of the two public science fiction museums in the world (along with Maison d'Ailleurs, a science fiction museum in Yverdon-les-Bains (Switzerland). The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame was founded by Paul Allen and Jody Patton and opened to the public on June 18, 2004. Members of the museum's advisory board include Steven Spielberg, Ray Bradbury, James Cameron, and George Lucas. Among its collection of artifacts are Captain Kirk's command chair from Star Trek, the B9 robot from Lost in Space, the Death Star model from Star Wars, the T800 Terminator and the dome from the film Silent Running. The X Prize trophy is currently on display in the museum's lobby.

The museum is divided into several galleries with a common themes such as "Homeworld," "Fantastic Voyages," "Brave New Worlds" and "Them!" Each gallery displays related memorabilia (movie props, first editions, costumes and models) in large display cases, posters, and interactive displays to sketch out the different subjects. "From robots to jet packs to space suits and ray guns, it's all here."

The Hall of Fame was founded as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1996 by the Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society and the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. There you will find listed all your favorite authors of the past and some present and other notables in the world of science fiction.

One of my particular favorites in the museum is the case that contains copies of some of the old pulp magazine that were prevalent from the 1920s to the 1950s. I cut my SF teeth on those magazines.