I mentioned Andrew Pickering’s history of British cybernetics to Clayton Lewis, and he immediately thought of Grey Walter’s tortoises. Clayton pointed me to Valentino Braitenberg’s vehicles. The Wikipedia write-up made me wonder about a Turing Test equivalent for agency: the mo-cap test.
The Wikipedia article asserts that “This behavior is undoubtedly goal-directed, flexible and adaptive, and might even appear to be intelligent, the way some minimal intelligence is attributed to a cockroach.”
The mo-cap test:
- Attach motion capture balls to both (say) a Braitenberg vehicle and a cockroach;
- Record their movements; use the mocap to drive an animation;
- See if people can distinguish between one as organic and the other as technology.
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| Grey Walter, time-lapse photo with one of his tortoises, via IEEE Spectrum. Photo: Larry Burrows/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images. |
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