Brooks, Rod
<p>email is brooks@csail.mit.edu ...</p>
<p>Feb 26, 2009 11:04 PM
born 1954; CTO of iRobot; dir of MIT CS and AIL til 2007
Jan 18, 2011 04:36 PM
What children can do (page 1 of <strong>IEEE 2008 article by Brooks: I, Rodney Brooks, Am a Robot)</strong>)
see article online.
<strong>The object-recognition capabilities of a 2-year-old child</strong>. <strong>A 2-year-old can observe a variety of objects</strong> of some type--different kinds of shoes, say--and successfully categorize them as shoes, even if he or she has never seen soccer cleats or suede oxfords. Today's best computer vision systems still make mistakes--both false positives and false negatives--that no child makes.
<strong>The language capabilities of a 4 year old child.</strong> By age 4, children can <strong>engage in a dialogue using complete clauses</strong> and can handle irregularities, idiomatic expressions, a vast array of accents, noisy environments, incomplete utterances, and interjections, and they can <strong>even correct nonnative speakers, inferring what was really meant</strong> in an ungrammatical utterance and reformatting it. Most of these capabilities are still hard or impossible for computers.
<strong>The manual dexterity of a 6 year old child.</strong> At 6 years old, children can <strong>grasp objects they have not seen befor</strong>e; manipulate flexible objects in tasks like <strong>tying shoelaces</strong>; <strong>pick up flat, thin objects like playing card</strong>s or pieces of paper from a tabletop; and<strong> manipulate unknown objects in their pockets </strong>or in a bag into which they can't see. Today's robots can at most do any one of these things for some very particular object.
<strong>The social understanding of an 8 year old child</strong>. By the age of 8, a child can understand the difference between what <strong>he or she knows about a situation and what another person could have observed</strong> and therefore could know. The child has what is called a ”<strong>theory of the mind” </strong>of the other person. For example, suppose a child sees her mother placing a chocolate bar inside a drawer. The mother walks away, and the child's brother comes and takes the chocolate. The child knows that in<strong> her mother's mind the chocolate is still in the drawer.</strong> This ability requires a level of perception across many domains that no AI system has at the moment.
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