Blog post # 9 or 10... I give up... The Rest Of The Five Stages

Seeing as I have two books going at the moment, I suppose I should do a post on the other one. Is that against the rules? I don't think so... Oh well!

    A great thing about this book (it makes blogging easier) is that it devides scientific topics by discoveries, and tells a story about each one. It sucks that I have to pick just one! (flips to random page) Robots it is!

     Rodney Brooks was one of the first people to do a thesis paper on AI (artificaial intelligence), for him the refusal of the call was a huge part in his decision. He wished to create plans for a computer software that would be able to think for it's self. This was a huge step to take in computer enginering. "In fact, our most advanced robots, such as the robot rovers on the planet Mars, have the intelligence of an insect."(Kaku, 109)

      To go from an insect to a fully functioning humanoid you would need to establish a thought process, which was the first big problem, his first prototype could manipulate speach, but did not understand it. As an added difficulty, the number of neurons that a fruit fly (a comparable insect) has in it's brain is around 25,000 a human has around 10 billion. It would call for computers to suddenly increase their complexity by as much as 400,000 times. Although he accpeted the call, he had many thoughts of quitting, and to top it all off, he was not able to come up with the software. "fourty years ago the Artificial Intelligence Labritory at MIT appointed an undergraduate to solve it over the summer. He failed, and I failed on the same problem in my 1981 Ph.D thesis."(Rodeney Brooks)
  
      Quick question, is it still a journey archetype if the hero never succeds?
      Here's a quick video to let you know where we stand with AI:

Blog Post #9 (I think) The Ordinary World

     Though I find that many of the people in A Brief history Of Time deserve to be called a protagonist, one story (from the first chapter) really caught my attention. It was that of Galileo Galilei, who was one of the first to publicly believe in the copernicus' model where the sun was the center of our solar system and the earth rovolved around it.
Nicholaus Copernicus
     Copernicus believed that people would be willing to accept the theory, as it was able to explain why jupiter's moons orbited jupiter rather than following a complicated orbit around the earth. He owned one of the first telescopes, and made the observation himself, that jupiter's moons orbited jupiter. When Galileo was presented with the information, he published a paper about it, and left it alone. Really his ordinary world was a mideval version of ours, with a house, a job, and books to read, what realy changed this was when he was detained by the church as a heretic and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. As an interesting fact, the church only admited that they were wrong to condem Galileo for his ideas on November 1st 1992, 359 years after the fact. 
Galileo Galilei 
      People in Galileo's time were under constant pressure from the church. If you didn't believe what they believed, you could persercuted as tougly as if you had killed a man. The church origionally thought that all other heavenly bodies orbited in spheres around the earth at fixed lengths, the final sphere consisted of the stars that were fixed to our view and never changing. Outside the final sphere of fixed stars, the church supposed a heaven and hell existed, when this idea was challenged, they we're not happy. it must have taken a great deal of courage to challenge something that many people had held on to for hundreds of years, it took him 10 years to full publish his unedited copy of the paper, for fear that the church would have him killed.