Questions on Kelly ch 2-3

1) pp. 29-30 In what ways do Pauline’s artistic life and personal life converge?

2) Pp. 30-31 What meaning does Pauline attribute to his machines?

3) Pp. In what ways do both the construction methods and final products of Pauline reflect the “convergence of the organic and the machine?”

4) P. 33 How does Pauline see his art as getting us to rethink machines? How does this compare to the Minsky-Engelbart debate?

5) P. 34-35 Why is it that Pauline has been able to out-do robotics at MIT and CMU with 1/1000^th of their budget?

6) Pp. 35-37 Compare Ambler with Brook’s “ant approach.”

7) Pp.37-38 What experiences led to Brook’s “fast, cheap and out of control” theory?

8) Pp. 39-40 How did the programmers of Genghis know what algorithms to install in its central controller? In what ways did they mimic the approach of biological evolution?

9) Pp.40 How does the “collection machine” illustrate bottom-up control?

10)Pp. 41 Explain subsumption architecture.

11)Pp. 41-42 Compare bottom-up vs top-down control in social systems.

12)Pp. 42-43 How might bottom-up control offer a better model for human consciousness?

13)Pp. 43-44 What prevents Minsky’s “society of mind” model from becoming a rigid bureaucracy? What are the implications for models of the self?

14)Pp. 45 Explain the relations between hierarchy and decentralization in subsumption architecture.

15)Pp. 45-46 Compare chunking in multiplication and division. What are the implications for robotics?

16)Pp. 46-47 What does Brooks mean by “communication through the world?” How does this compare to a market economy?

17)Pp. 48-49 what are the implications for Brook’s work for robot scale and practical usage?

18)Pp. 49-50 How does Brook’s work imply that the old Science Fiction idea of “mind transfer” is wrong?

19)Pp. 51-53 What happens to the mind in the absence of the body? Why?

20)Pp. 53-54 what implications do Pauline and Brooks see for the relations of bodies and evolution?

21)Pp. 55-56 compare the implications of natural evolution and artificial evolution

22)Pp. 57-59 Why did Steve Packard’s prairie recreation succeed where Aldo Leopold’s had failed?

23)Pp. 60-62 What else besides fire was critical to Packard’s success?

24)Pp. 63-64 Explain the “anti-chaos” discovered by Pimm and Drake in vivo and in silico. How does this compare to Wingate’s work on Nonsuch in the Bermudas?

25)P.. 67-68 What is the catch in these happy stories of ecological recovery?