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Rodney Brooks Rodney Allen Brooks is currently (as of 2005) director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Panasonic Professor of Robotics. He is Chief Technical Officer and sits on the Board of iRobot Corp. His seminal work in robotics, first published in 1986 and subsequently elaborated upon in a series of highly influential papers, inaugurated a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence research. Brooks has argued strongly against symbolic processing approaches to creating intelligent machines, which had been the focus of AI since the days of Alan Turing, directly tracing back to the work of Gottlob Frege. Instead, Brooks has focused on biologically-inspired robotic architectures (e.g., the Subsumption architecture) that address basic perceptual and sensorimotor tasks. These had been largely dismissed as uninteresting by the mainstream AI community, which was far more interested in reasoning about the real world than in interacting with it. Conversely, Brooks argued that interacting with the physical world is far more difficult than symbolically reasoning about it. This perspective is perhaps best and most eloquently described in his classic paper, Elephants Don't Play Chess. His books include, Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI, and Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us.
Related Links • Rodney
Brooks' website
Rodney Brooks Quotes Humanoid intelligence requires humanoid interactions with the world. The thing that puzzles me is that we've got all these biological metaphors that we're playing around with – artificial immunology systems, building robots that appear lifelike – but none of them come close to real biological systems in robustness and in performance. They look a little like it, but they're not really like biological systems. What I'm worrying about is that perhaps in looking at biological systems we're missing something that's always in there. You might be tempted to call it an essence of life, but I'm not talking about anything outside of biology or chemistry. The central idea that I've been playing with for the last 12-15 years is that what we are and what biological systems are. It's not what's in the head, it's in their interaction with the world. You can't view it as the head, and the body hanging off the head, being directed by the brain, and the world being something else out there. It's a complete system, coupled together.
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