[FRIAM] goal/function/robots

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Here's the example I was trying to lay out for the zFriam Leftovers when my
house got flooded. It concerns simple robots, "didabots", that if unleashed
in a room full of randomly placed Styrofoam cubes, will tidy up the room by
herding the cubes into clusters.  

 

http://www.verena-hafner.de/teaching/didabots.pdf

 

Here is what Louise Barrett's BEYOND THE BRAIN says about the example:

 

It should be clear that this "clustering" is not the "goal" of the
individual didabots . .  Clustering is an emergent property (=consequence?)
. this complex behavior is produced, not only by a very simple mechanism,
but also by a mechanism that bears absolutely no relation to the behavioral
outcome produced when that mechanism operates in the real world.. .  Poking
around inside a didabot to identify the nature of this mechanism won't tell
us anything about didabot [herding] behavior because it makes sense only
after we have taken into account the interaction of the internal mechanisms
with the physical structure of the didabot and the structure of the
environment. (p49)

 

It seems to me that understanding the distinction between goal and function,
we have to look at the same behavior, simultaneously from two different
points of view.   The first is what outcome the behavor is directed toward
(avoiding obstacles on the side) and the outcome robot (organism) has been
designed to produce (the herding of the blocks) within its 
ecological" context.  The seagull is a robot whose goal is to remove shiny
things from the nest;  natural selection has designed that seagull  so that
it avoids predation by vision-using predators. That this behavior
constitutes a design is demonstrated by widening the lens still further and
showing that shell removal is characteritic of surface nesting gulls but NOT
of the closely related kitiwake gulls which nest on cliffs that ground
searching predators cannot reach. 

 

This is an old story that has no doubt been altered by time, but the logic
of attribution of goal, selection mechanism, and design remains the same.  

 

It is these sorts of examples that lead me to think that the decoupling
between goal and function or design is an essential feature of control
systems generally.  Designers, human and natural, are all the same.  As soon
as the machine produces the outcome we desire, we stop designing.  

 

Nick 

 

Nick  

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> 

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

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