Robot Extravaganza

Robots are fascinating. Whether you think they’ll one day surpass our intelligence and become overlords, or just keep beeping along peacefully, it’s fun to think about robots. What can we accomplish with them? Will they ever develop sentient thought? Will they learn to feel emotions? In fact, our new chapter this week focused on robots, but we still haven’t had enough. (Is it possible, to get enough of robots?) 1. Teaching Me Softly Machine learning is teaching us the secret to teaching. By Alan S. Brown When Pyotr Stolyarsky died in 1944, he was considered Russia’s greatest violin teacher. He counted among his pupils a coterie of stars, including David Oistrakh and Nathan Milstein, and a school for gifted musicians in his native Odessa was named after him in 1933. But Stolyarsky couldn’t play the violin anywhere near as well as his best students. What he could do was whisper metaphors into their ears. He might lean over and explain how his mother cooked Sabbath dinner. His advice gave no specific information on what angle the bow should describe, or how to move the fingers across the frets to create vibrato. Instead, it distilled his experience of the music into metaphors his students could understand. READ MORE 2. Encounters with the Posthuman As bodies meld with machines, are we leaving ourselves behind? By Sally Davies On the second balmy day of the year in New York, Neil Harbisson, a Catalan artist, musician, and self-professed “cyborg,” walked into a café in the Nolita district of Manhattan. The actor Gabriel Byrne was sitting at a table in the corner. Harbisson approached. “May I do a sound portrait of you? It will just take one minute. For nine years, I’ve been listening to colors,” he explained. READ MORE 3. Why the Chess Computer Deep Blue Played Like a Human Randomness may be key to both human and computer creativity. By David Auerbach When IBM’s Deep Blue beat chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997 in a six-game chess match, Kasparov came to believe he was facing a machine that could experience human intuition. “The machine refused to move to a position that had a decisive short-term advantage,” Kasparov wrote after the match. It was “showing a very human sense of danger.” To Kasparov, Deep Blue seemed to be experiencing the game rather than just crunching numbers. READ MORE To really curl up with Nautilus, subscribe today and get your copy of our Winter 2015 Nautilus Quarterly. It includes new features, some of our best online content, and pages of sumptuous illustration. Join us on a journey of surprises.