Larry FloerschMany people these days are very concerned about what they see as the sinister potential of robotics and artificial intelligence. “What if,” they ask, “robots using AI become as smart or smarter than we humans? Will we become involved in a ‘war against the machines’ like in that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie?”
To that I say, “Posh! That war is already lost!” Looking at the current turmoil in our nation’s capital and the congressional reaction to it, in my view robots becoming as smart as humans is setting the bar pretty low for robots.
And think about all the good robots can do for us. A case in point is a recent study that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which robots helped solve an issue that has been burning in the national psyche since the middle of the last century — the Hula Hoop puzzle.
Now, robots even working on such a puzzle shows how smart robots may have become, because I am a person of average intelligence who has been around since before 1958, when the Hula Hoop became a national fad, and I did not even know there was a Hula Hoop puzzle.
The Hula Hoop puzzle, in brief, is “How does a Hula Hoop stay up as it revolves around the user?” If you’ve ever tried to entertain yourself with a Hula Hoop, and I use the word ‘entertain’ loosely here, you know the problem. In my first attempts, the hoop hit the ground after about one and a half revolutions. At first, I tried to chalk that up to a defective Hula Hoop rather than a lack of coordination or brain power, but, like any good scientist, after a thorough inspection of the hoop I was forced to revise my initial hypothesis.
To be fair, it wasn’t robots that were first intrigued by the phenomenon of a Hula Hoop remaining aloft when under the control of a smart and coordinated user. Not being quite as intelligent as humans, the robots probably had other more frivolous things on their circuit boards, such as whether Schrödinger’s cat could be both dead and alive at the same time.
Rather, it was a professor of applied mathematics at New York University named Leif Ristroph, who, no doubt sitting in the lab late one afternoon having a beer and looking for something to study, happened to spy a dusty Hula Hoop in the corner that had remained untouched since its original owner moved on to doing “the Twist” to Chubby Checker’s tunes.
Essentially, Ristroph and his colleagues enlisted the aid of robots with different body shapes to determine the best shape for keeping a Hula Hoop aloft.
What they found is that a robot with a cylindrical body, that is, one in which the diameter of its body did not vary, could not keep the hoop from migrating down while it gyrated because it could not apply upward force on the hoop to offset gravity.
Likewise, a cone-shaped robot, one in which the diameter of its body became larger from top to bottom, could not easily control the hoop. If the hoop was low down on its body, the upward force during gyrations was not enough to keep the hoop from falling, whereas if the hoop was higher up on its body, the gyrations produced an upward force that overpowered gravity, and the hoop quickly moved upward.
The ideal shape according to Ristroph and his colleagues resembles an hourglass. With an hourglass-shaped robot, the lower portion of its body (think “the hips”) exerts an upward force to keep the hoop aloft, while the upper portion of the body (“the torso”) keeps the hoop from migrating too far upward. The narrower middle portion, “the waist,” is the sweet spot, and the robot had no problems keeping the hoop spinning evenly with its gyrations.
I was disappointed to see, however, that the puzzle was not completely solved — at least for me. After reading about the study, I thought about people like me, including the current occupant of the Oval Office. Nowhere in the study report did the researchers mention trying the experiment on a robot shaped like a beer barrel.
I was encouraged by the authors’ conclusions that all humans should be able to Hula-Hoop regardless of body shape because, unlike robots, we can pretty much infinitely adapt our gyrations to the hoop’s position, that is, if you didn’t flunk Phys Ed like I did.
And before you start feeling smug that we are still smarter than robots, remember that Ristroph and his investigators did have a robot with a conical body that adjusted the rate of its gyrations to keep the hoop at a steady level.
Can the Terminator be far behind?
