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Leather clad robots will only pogo to punk rock |
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by Davey Winder
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Sunday, 06 July 2008 |
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Page 2 of 2 Professor McOwan of Queen Mary University, a
computational neuroscientist, helped Fiddian create the robots. "The
idea is to look at the information processing strategies that have
taken billions of years to develop through evolution, steal them and
put them into computers" he told the BBC. In the case of the
robots, having been trained to appreciate the music of the punk genre,
the hope is that in the frenzy of a live performance they will be able
to react to the amount of punk in each song. The more punk, the more
pogoing.
But what is the point of the pogoing robotic
punks, other than to prove it can be done? According to Fiddian there
are many things to be explored with this particular exercise, including:
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Analogies between human and computer learning and memory, brought into
sharp focus by placing robots, controlled by Neural Networks, within an
audience of humans
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Disparities and analogies between organic and technological embodied
systems that appreciate punk and physically react have a strong
cultural and social impact
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The workings of neural-network systems, analogous to human cognitive
function, which are trained, or taught, with ‘classic punk’: however
they are flexible enough to learn and change there taste (or level of
‘enjoyment’) during the course of performances
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The debate around cognition, its embodiment and how human physiology
and computer neural networks differ. The robots have mutable memory and
learn through experience. What are we compared to the
experience-empowered robot and what would we be if that memory were
removed?
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