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William Grey Walter foi um neurofisiologista e roboticista estadunidense. Seus pais eram originalmente Alemães/Ingleses, do lado do pai, e Americano/Ingleses, do lado da mãe. Ele foi trazido à Inglaterra em 1915, e educado na Westminster School e posteriormente no King's College, em Cambridge, no ano de 1931. Ele falhou ao tentar obter uma bolsa de estudos em pesquisa em Cambridge então começou a fazer as pesquisas neurofisiológicas básicas e aplicadas em hospitais, em London, de 1935 a 1939 e depois disso no Burden Neurological Institute em Bristol, de 1939 a 1970. Ele também fez pesquisas nos Estados Unidos, na União Soviética e em vários outros lugares na Europa. Ele se casou duas vezes, e teve dois filhos no primeiro casamento e um no segundo. De acordo com seu filho mais velho, Nicolas Walter, "ele era politicamente da esquerda, um comunista durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial e um simpatizante anarquista após ela.". Durante sua vida ele foi um pioneiro no campo da cibernética. Em 1970 ele sofreu um acidente de automóvel grave e morreu sete anos depois em 6 de Maio de 1977 sem ter se recuperado completamente. Wikipedia  

✵ 19. Fevereiro 1910 – 6. Maio 1977
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William Grey Walter: 12   citações 0   Curtidas

William Grey Walter: Frases em inglês

“In any case there is an intense modern interest in machines that imitate life. The great difference between magic and the scientific imitation of life is that where the former is content to copy external appearance, the latter is concerned more with performance and behavior.”

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William Grey Walter

Fonte: An imitation of life (1950), p. 42.

“The mechanism of learning is of course one of the most enthralling and baffling mysteries in the field of biology.”

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William Grey Walter

Fonte: A machine that learns (1951), p. 60.

“In the dark ages before the invention of the electronic vacuum tube there were many legends of living statues and magic pictures. One of the commonest devices of sorcerers and witches was the model of an enemy which somehow embodied his soul, so that injury to the model would be reflected by suffering or death of the original… Idolatry, witchcraft and other superstitions are so deeply rooted and widespread that it is possible that even the most detached scientific activity may be psychologically equivalent to them; such activity may help to satisfy the desire for power, to assuage the fear of the unknown or to compensate for the flatness of everyday existence.”

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William Grey Walter

Fonte: An imitation of life (1950), p. 42.

“Some of these patterns of performance were calculable, though only as types of behaviour, in advance; some were quite unforeseen.”

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William Grey Walter

Fonte: The Living Brain (1953), p. 130 : Note about the recording of the behavior of a complex system

“[E]xperiments with a simple little machine, designed to mimic certain elementary features of animal behavior… Consisting only of two vacuum tubes, two motors, a photoelectric cell and a touch contact, all enclosed in a tortoise-shaped 'shell, the model was a species of artificial creature which could explore its surroundings and seek out favorable conditions. It was named Machine speculatrix.”

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William Grey Walter

Fonte: A machine that learns (1951), p. 60.

“Not in looks, but in action, the model must resemble an animal. Therefore it must have these or some measure of these attributes: exploration, curiosity, free-will in the sense of unpredictability, goalseeking, self-regulation, avoidance of dilemmas, foresight, memory, learning, forgetting, association of ideas, form recognition, and the elements of social accommodation. Such is life.”

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William Grey Walter

Fonte: The Living Brain (1953), p. 120–121.

“These models are of course so simple that any more detailed comparison between them and living creatures would be purely conjectural.”

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William Grey Walter

Fonte: A machine that learns (1951), p. 63.

“[A]n electro-mechanical creature which behaves so much like an animal that it has been known to drive a not usually timid lady upstairs to lock herself in her bedroom, an interesting blend of magic and science.”

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William Grey Walter

Fonte: The Living Brain (1953), p. 82 : Description of the behavior of his first autonomous turtle robots, called Tortoise or Machina speculatrix.

“[Walter even gave the tortoises a mock-biological name, Machina speculatrix] because they illustrate particularly the exploratory, speculative behaviour that is so characteristic of most animals.”

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William Grey Walter

Fonte: An imitation of life (1950), p. 43 as cited in: Owen Holland (2003) " The first biologically inspired robots http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/holland02first.pdf"

“Rapidly going over what I could recall of Jim Bursley's information about pathological curves confirmed the conjecture. The snowball curve, derived from an equilateral triangle, is a perimeter of infinite length enclosing a finite area. The angles or points of the perimeter are uncountable. An equilateral triangle projected integrally in the third dimension is a triangular pyramid of equal surfaces. The three-dimensional snowflake derived from this pyramid--hence its diamantine appearance--is a finite volume enclosed in a surface of infinite area. The convolutions of such a surface, to be gathered around its defined content extrude a number of discrete angles or points beyond all possibility of computation. The pressure on each point is infinitesimal, unmeasurably small; the total external pressure exerted on any part of the surface is an aggregate of infinitesimal values, itself infinitesimal.”

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William Grey Walter

Fonte: The Curve of the Snowflake (1956), p. 126.

“Simon, always a fool for simplicity, accepted. Punch took an envelope out of his pocket and scribbled on the back of it. He said, 'This has a simple arithmetical proof but no rational explanation of the paradox.' He gave it to Simon. Simon read it, looked at Punch with raised eyebrows, hunched his shoulders, shook his head sadly, and got up and left the room without a word.”

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William Grey Walter

Fonte: The Curve of the Snowflake (1956), p. 72.

“The first notion of constructing a free goal-seeking mechanism goes back a wartime talk with the psychologist, Kenneth Craik, whose untimely death was one of the greatest losses Cambridge has suffered in years. When he was engaged on a warjob for the Government, he came to get the help of an automatic analyzer with some very complicated curves he had obtained, curves relating to the aiming errors of air gunners. Goal-seeking missiles were literally much in the air in those days; so, in our minds, were scanning mechanisms. Long before the home study was turned into a workshop, the two ideas, goal-seeking and scanning, had combined as the essential mechanical conception of a working model that would behave like a very simple animal.”

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William Grey Walter

Fonte: The Living Brain (1953), p. 82.