Word: robotics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Biting Satire. These days, Czechoslovakia's writers specialize in biting satire on Communist bureaucracy. Their work is in the tradition of Kafka and Karel Capek, whose play R.U.R. first introduced the concept of a robot. In The Memorandum, a popular play by Vaclav Havel, the main character gets an important memorandum in an impenetrable official language; in order to get permission to learn the language, he must first write a petition in it. One of the biggest hits of the Prague theater season, The Labyrinth by Ladislav Smoček, shows men imprisoned in a maze of park pathways...
...Thinking" computers, based on random functions, exist today. These machines, programmed to learn by trial and error as humans do, are essentially Turing's robot. Hence, Mortimer Adler's argument is obsolete-and man's uniqueness again becomes questionable...
...already tested the bearing strength of the lunar surface and scouted all the proposed flatland target sites for the U.S.'s first manned moon mission. This was accomplished spectacularly in four out of six shots; Surveyor's budget authorized seven. What to do with the last moon robot? As a sort of job-end bonus for a mission brilliantly accomplished, NASA left it up to a panel of lunar experts. They decided to gamble on an exploratory shot to one of the moon's unknown upland regions: the rock-strewn ridges just north of the crater Tycho...
...scientists began lowering it on a nylon cord. Halfway down, the box stuck. Using the spacecraft's TV camera to hunt for the source of the trouble and working with duplicate models, JPL scientists and engineers from JPL and Hughes Aircraft, designer of the moon robot, struggled to set it free. Twice they nudged it with the digger arm. No luck. All it did was swing a bit. Then they tried again, using the arm to steady the box against Surveyor and simultaneously pressing down. This time, success. The box descended to the lunar surface, and the crucial, drawn...
...consequence, as Jaspers sees it, is that West Germany has become a kind of robot state without a heart. He writes despairingly: "We still have neither roots nor an ideal in politics, no sense of where we come from or where we are going . . . Neither in the operations of our business nor in our passing, swiftly forgotten excitements is there a faith or an ethos." But Jaspers does not leave matters with this harsh judgment. He is more than a gadfly...