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Dinner with
Android
A lot of claims have been made
lately about the intelligences of computers.
Some researchers say
that computers will eventually attain
super-human
intelligence. Others call these claims...um,
poppycock. Oddly, in the
search for the truth of the
matter, both camps have overlooked an obvious
strategy:
interviewing a computer and asking its opinion.
Intrepid
researcher Tom Sgouros (compared in the past to
monologists Spalding Gray
and Garrison Keillor) has leapt into
this lacuna, and presents some
preliminary findings in a new
not-quite-solo show (You could call it "My
Dinner with
Android").
The central
question is: "If you built a robot smart enough to do the
dishes,
would it also be smart enough to find them
boring?"
Judy herself was
assembled in Tom's basement, fro pieces of old computers, bicycles,
a copy machine, a marine stove, and - improbable but true - an old
kitchen sink. After literally weeks of intensive tutoring in
phonics,
elocution, and the elements of logic, Judy made her
public debut in January,
2000 at Providence's Perishable Theatre,
and then again in May, in New York
city (at only a small distance
from Broadway), in a show entitled, "Judy" or
"What Is It Like to
Be A Puppet?"
The seventh in a
series of possibly comic monologues and solo dialogues,
"Judy" is
a story of a man and his, um, companion, discussing such topics
as
imagination, consciousness, stage magic, the uses of eyes, and
what its
really like to wake up each morning and confront your
aluminum-and-steel
face in the mirror each
day.
Judy and Tom (and the
BCRAC) invite you to come share some of their
empirical findings
on the consciousness of robots and actors, in this
new,
not-quite-solo show on Wednesday, April 11 at 7:00 p.m. at
the Keystone
Theatre in Towanda. Admission is free for
anyone with a FIRST-SME or SME (Society of Manufacturing Engineers)
membership card. General admission ticket prices are $3.00 and
may be purchased at the
door.
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Robotics Team Strong Force at
Regionals
What: Johnson & Johnson Mid-Atlantic Regional,
FIRST Robotics Competition
When: March 15-17, 2001
Where:
Rutgers University, New Brunswick,
NJ
Today as morning dawns,
groggy souls of the Robotics team from Bradford County arise to a
day of high expectations on the first day of Regional
Competition. Leaving from the Towanda GPU parking lot at 5:30
am yesterday (Thursday), the Robotics team made their way to Rutgers
University, New Brunswick campus where the Johnson &
Johnson Mid-Atlantic Regional is taking place. Here, the team
began the tedious unpacking process of the robot. After a
thorough inspection by US FIRST supervisors, Chuck (the team
robot) passed with flying
colors.
After a break for
lunch, Chuck made its way to the arena where in its
first practice round it displayed an outstanding
exhibition. The round showed our team and others that we were
one tough machine capable of multiple tasks. We were one of
the few that could showcase
this.
The team, overjoyed that
the six weeks of work finally paid off, made its way back to
the pit to tweak and fine-tune the robot. At our second
exhibition, we made use of a stretcher, which holds disabled
robots. We finished off our show and proved to other
teams that we are an outstanding team, capable of placing well
this competition.
Today, Friday, signals the kick-off of the Competition match
play. WATTNESS and our robot Chuck will compete in qualifying
rounds throughout the day with the hopes of qualifying for
Semi-final and Final Rounds on Saturday. Expectations are
high.
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