Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Braitenberg uses simple elecro-mechanical vehicles to demonstrate how very simple rules and designs can create surprisingly complex behavior.
I used the vehicles to teach simple electronics concepts in a college level 'Electronics 101' course. The students were not only fascinated by the vehicles themselves, but could directly experience the effects of electronic components (resistors, capacitors, inductors, etc.)
But the true value of the book comes from the delightful writing and stimulating ideas. After reading it through the first time, I knew it would entrance and motivate students.
There is no need to construct any of the vehicles Braitenberg describes (in fact, I'm sure the author didn't intend that), but if you're a tinkerer, you probably won't be able to resist!
I must respectfully disagree with the first reviewer's comments and rating. Granted, the book is neither a hard science book, nor is it an engineering cookbook. You won't learn any formulas or electronic theory, nor will you learn a new theory of intelligence. Instead, you'll find a wonderful romp through fun ideas drawn from complexity theory, artificial intelligence, perception, and philosophy. You may even see hidden (but not too deeply) a sneaky critique of behavioralism.
I recommend this book highly to students and educators, tinkers and engineers. It's a good book. Definitely worth a read!
Click Here to see more reviews about: Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology
The "vehicles" described in this light-hearted yet wonderfully skillful exercise in fictional science are the inventions of one of the world's eminent brain researchers. There are 14 of them in all—a series of hypothetical, self-operating mobile machines that exhibit increasingly sophisticated behavior similar to that in the real biological or neuroscientific world.One might assemble Braitenberg's vehicles like cunning table-top toys that might look like the fantastic Albrecht drawings which illustrate them in the. Whatever their guise, they behave like living creatures, ranging from simple light-seeking automata to vehicles that an observing psychologist or philosopher might conclude were operated by concealed human beings.Each of the vehicles in the series incorporates the essential features of all the earlier models but represents an evolutionary advance to a higher plateau of complexity (including the designer's accidents or mistakes that sometimes resulted in a better machine). Along the way, they come to embody the instincts of fight or flight, the characteristic behaviors impelled by love and by logic, manifestations of foresight, concept formation, creative thinking, personality, and free will. Braitenberg shows that these attributes and patterns of behavior can be internalized into machines using the simplest parts—a collection of environmental sensors, some wheel-driving motors, various threshold devices, a few fictional (but logically and technologically plausible) components with special properties. He locates many elements of his fantasy in current brain research in a concluding section of extensive biological notes.A Bradford Book.
Buy cheap Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology now.
No comments:
Post a Comment