The English cyberneticist, neurophysiologist and psychiatrist Gray Walter was born in 1910. His robot turtles or, as the creator called them, machina speculatrix, he began to create in 1948 and continued to experiment with them until 1951. They were mechanical carts that could move towards or away from the light, and also get to the sources of recharging batteries, bypassing various obstacles. They were nicknamed turtles due to their slowness and appearance. Unlike most robots of those years, moving according to a predetermined pattern, Gray Walter's "turtles" could respond to changes in the external environment.
The father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, described Gray Walter's robots as follows:
“Having grasped the analogy between feedback in a machine and the human nervous system, around the same time as I, Walter began to design mechanisms that would replicate some of the behavior of animals. I've been working on creating a "moth" that would automatically crawl into the light. Walter called his automata "turtles", incorporating more complex numbers into their repertoire. "Turtles" were equipped with a device that helped them not to collide with each other when moving, and, in addition, a device due to which, feeling "hunger", i.e. depleted batteries, they were sent to a special "feeding place" where they swallowed electricity until the batteries were recharged.
Gray Walter created 8 variants of turtle robots. So, the "turtle" Elmer looked like a three-wheeled cart, equipped with two electric motors, which were powered by batteries. One engine provided the forward movement of the cart, the second - changed the direction of its movement. The motors could be controlled by electromagnetic relays. Thanks to the photocell, which was located on the steering column of the trolley, the robot could recognize obstacles.
Basically, the robot turtle could act according to three patterns: moving towards the light, turning towards the light, and avoiding obstacles. If the battery was charged and the lighting in the room was weak, the robot slowly moved around the room in search of a light source, when it collided with obstacles, it corrected the direction of movement. Accordingly, if a source of bright light appeared in the room, the turtle robot moved in its direction. At the same time, having reached the source of light, he turned away from him, as if "afraid" of blinding, after which he moved around this source, finding the optimal position for himself. When its battery began to discharge, the robot moved closer and closer to the light source, and when the battery level was low, the robot came close to this source and connected to the charger. After charging the battery, the robot moved away from the light source again.
Another robot, Elsie, reacted more actively to changes in light. If there were two light sources in the room, the robot moved first to one lamp, then to the other. In addition, the robots could recognize each other by a lit light bulb and moved towards each other.
Not only to changes in light, but also to sound, the robot turtle Cora was able to respond. Cora “heard” thanks to the microphone. In addition, the presence of a capacitor that retained an electric charge for some time ensured that this robot had something like a conditioned reflex. In this way, Kora could be trained.
The British call the conditioned reflex learned reflex - a learned reflex. The reflex is developed in case of repetition of the same action; without this, the conditioned reflex disappears. In the case of the turtle robot Cora, the conditioned stimulus was the sound of a whistle. When Cora stumbled upon this or that obstacle, a whistle sounded. At first, the robot turtle did not react to the sound of the whistle, then, having heard the whistle, it changed the direction of movement, even if there was no obstacle in front of it. If Walter too often gave Kora sound signals in the absence of barriers, then this conditioned reflex disappeared from her.
While experimenting with Cora, Walter always tried to complicate her behavior. Since English police whistles were two-tone, the scientist used this circumstance. The scientist used the second tone of the whistle to create a second auditory circuit for his robot, linking it to the appearance of a new light source in the room. The first type of whistle sounded when the turtle reached the next obstacle, and the second - before the light came on.
In this regard, Walter wondered how the robot turtle Kora would react to two whistle tones sounded at the same time. In turn, the turtle robot reacted to this situation like a living creature. After processing the information received, Cora huddled in a dark corner in order to recuperate from sensory overload. After a while, she returned to normal functioning and again began to look for a light source.
Thus, the robots created by Gray Walter showed the elements of development inherent in living beings, correcting behavior patterns depending on external circumstances. Experiments with the external environment and the “nervous system” of turtle robots led to interesting results: the behavior of the robots was never repeated, but their actions always fit within a certain behavioral pattern, as happens in living beings.
The inventions of Gray Walter interested the world scientific community and inspired other scientists to create robots of this kind. For example, the American Edmund Berkeley invented a squirrel that collects nuts and carries them to the nest, the mouse, created by Claude Shannon, was able to find a way in a maze, the electronic foxes Barabara and Job, designed by the French physicist Albert Ducroc, reacted to touch, light and sound, and at the same time the appearance of light and sound caused the appearance of a conditioned reflex. The Soviet Union also created a robot that responds to external stimuli: such a turtle robot was built by the employees of the Institute of Automation and Telemechanics of the USSR Academy of Sciences A.P. Petrovsky and R.R. Vasiliev.
Also, the development of reflexes in robots was influenced by the work of the Italian neurologist and cybernetician Valentino Breitenburg, devoted to synthesizing biological behavior with the simplest schemes. So, his book "Machines: Experiments with Synthetic Psychology", written in 1984, became a classic.
In 2006, the American scientist Lambros Malafouris wrote the article "The Cognitive Basis of Material Engagement: Where Brain, Body, and Culture Conflate", which argued that the secret to the successful functioning of robots lies in the brain-body-environment connection. It was through this connection that Gray Walter's turtle robots exhibited the behaviors inherent in living organisms.
Experiments with artificial intelligence continue to this day. Robots have become much better at coping with their tasks, but in many respects modern scientists owe their success to Gray Walter.
William Gray Walter was one of the pioneers in two scientific fields at once - in neurophysiology and robotics. He was one of the first in the UK to apply the method of electroencephalography and found that by certain parameters of the electroencephalogram, it is possible to determine in which part of the brain the work of nerve cells is disrupted and how exactly it is disrupted. In addition, Gray Walter was a member of the interdisciplinaryclubRatio , whose residents discussed the then new science of cybernetics. Walter, using his knowledge of neuroscience, created several robots that can change their "behavior" depending on what is happening around. And although many believed that Gray Walter's machines were nothing more than crafts for entertainment and initial education in robotics, Walter's "turtles" (as the designer called them) are based on interesting biological principles.
Gray Walter's parents, journalists from the United States, met in Italy. Their son was born in the United States, but the couple decided that they would raise their son in the UK. Gray Walter graduated from King's College in Cambridge (King's College, Cambridge), but could not get a research position at the university, which is why he was forced to conduct neurophysiological research in London clinics for several years. In 1939, Walter got a job at the newly opened Institute Burden Neurological Institute (now defunct), where he worked until an accident in 1970.
Ironically, the incident that caused Walter's resignation was directly related to his research interests: it was a brain injury sustained in a traffic accident. (Unfortunately, the scientist never fully recovered from that wound and died in 1977 at the age of 67.) Gray Walter was the first to link certain forms of brain activity, distinguishable on an electroencephalogram, with neurological and psychiatric pathologies.
Electroencephalography
An electroencephalogram (EEG) is a recording of the total electrical activity of brain cells using electrodes placed on the scalp and lubricated with an electrically conductive gel. The number of electrodes may be different; modern devices usually use 64-128 pieces. The electrodes are installed symmetrically according to a certain system. The most famous of these systems is called "10-20"; these numbers represent percentages of the distance between the two extreme points on the skull. In brain activity, several types of rhythms are distinguished, denoted by the letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, mu, sigma, theta and kappa rhythms. In fact, these are waves that differ from each other in frequency and amplitude. Some of these rhythms appear with the eyes open, some with the eyes closed. The delta rhythm normally occurs in sleeping people, and the theta rhythm in those who are tired or ready to fall asleep. In addition, most EEG rhythms are normal only in some specific areas of the brain, and their appearance in other areas may be a signal of problems with the functioning of the nervous system.
Gray Walter not only discovered the connection between "brain waves" and nervous pathologies - he was the first to register some EEG rhythms. Walter was one of the first to use electroencephalography at all in the UK. The scientist became interested in electrophysiology after visiting the German laboratory of Hans Berger in 1935, the researcher who first took an electroencephalogram from the surface of the human head. Berger himself used only two electrodes, on the forehead and on the back of the head, and was able to register only the alpha rhythm. (As it turned out later, the alpha rhythm is primarily characteristic of the occipital regions.) Berger's German colleagues considered him an eccentric, and the method he used was considered unpromising.
Unlike the German skeptics, Gray Walter was excited about the idea of researching "brain waves". Returning to his homeland, he designed his own electroencephalograph, taking the Berger apparatus as a basis and complicating it. A year later, in 1936, Walter proved the connection between an unusual EEG rhythm and schizophrenia in one of the patients in a neurological clinic. It turned out that the patient's tumor cells show abnormal activity, and the place of manifestation of this activity on the electroencephalogram exactly coincided with the data on the localization of the tumor obtained by other methods. Some time later, Gray Walter found that in many patients with epilepsy, a delta rhythm often manifests itself during wakefulness, while normally it is characteristic of deep sleep.
In the late 1940s, Walter came to the conclusion: maybe EEG rhythms not only reflect the general state of a person, but also how the brain “scans” the space around its owner, receiving various sensory stimuli? In addition, in 1960, the scientist discovered the so-called readiness potential, the existence of which, by the way, calls into question the existence of free will in a person. The readiness potential occurs in the premotor cortex of the cerebral hemispheres before a person makes any movement, and, most importantly, before the subject realizes that he is going to make this movement at all.
"Turtles" by Walter
Gray Walter began to design various units as a child with his father. In adulthood, this passion did not disappear, and Walter continued to create moving cars. Only now he had knowledge about the structure of the nervous system and about the achievements of cybernetics. In his youth, Gray Walter sympathized with the ideas of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov about conditioned reflexes and even went to study at the laboratory of the Nobel laureate in St. Petersburg. However, Walter was still more interested in studying how the brain works as a whole, and not how individual reflex arcs are arranged. According to the scientist, a large number of connections between several logical elements could provide complex behavior no worse than a lot of the same type, but weakly interconnected "neurons". In addition, he believed that artificial intelligence should be created on the basis of analog elements, not digital ones (for the use of the latter, in particular, Alan Turing, Walter's colleague at the Ratio club, advocated).
Walter has repeatedly emphasized that he uses primarily biological principles when creating his robots. For their slowness and squat appearance, Gray Walter called his robots turtles, and in addition, he gave names to each unit. The first samples were called Elmer (ELMER: Electro-MEchanical Robot) and Elsie (ELSIE: Electro-mechanical robot, Light-Sensitive with Internal and External stability). The common name of the robots was built on the same principle as the species names of living organisms: Elmer and Elsie belonged to the "species" machinaspeculatrix.
« Turtles"had as simple a structure as possible: three wheels, two motors, two relays, two capacitors and one photocell. All this was assembled from parts from old electrical appliances and watches and covered with a "shell" - a streamlined casing. The uncomplicated design was designed to model important forms of behavior - the study of the surrounding space, the search for and achievement of the goal. Photoelectric cell on the "head" of the robot. In addition, Elmer and Elsie worked without wires, and came to recharge on their own in a special box with a light bulb inside. At the same time, "individuals" machinaspeculatrix could go around various obstacles - for example, mirrors, in which they themselves were reflected along with light sources. True, the robots “danced” in front of the mirrors for some time, as if considering what to do next. In some notes, Walter mentions this behavior as an example of self-recognition, which is unlikely to be true.
Later versions of "turtles" could prefer one of two identical light sources. In addition, Gray Walter constantly improved their speed and search trajectories for objects. And one of the latest models of Walter's robots, Irma (IRMA: Innate Releasing Mechanism Analogue), was designed to change its "behavior" depending on the signals that another robot gave. In this way, the two Irmas could adapt their actions to each other's "deeds".
Walter's followers developed "turtles" even after the researcher himself ceased his activities. New models of robots reacted not only to light, but also to sounds. Subsequently, the “turtles” began to be connected to computers, which gave the robots signals to act. At the heart of such machines were already somewhat different patterns than those of Gray Walter.
Archive ArticlesIn the 1950s, a British neuroscientist designed robots to study freedom of choice, self-regulation, and the social behavior of machines.
The progress of technology is a vector aimed at the future. The amount of knowledge accumulated by mankind, akin to a powerful mover, directs the researchers of the present to new technological breakthroughs. And only if you get close enough to this vector, you will notice that it is a spiral, the turns of which are often repetitions of past inventions based on the capabilities of the present.
This idea prompted me to visit the Modular Robotics website, where a friendly team of scientists from leading US universities is developing real pampering - electronic cubes (cubelets), from which you can easily create various versions of robots.
Entertainment for children? Undoubtedly. But also something more: the popularization of scientific achievements, the desire to involve people who are far from robotics and information technology in advanced developments in these areas.
The kids playing with the cubelets in the photo reminded me of a photo taken sixty years ago. On it, a child plays with ELSIE, a turtle robot, one of several amazing creations by British neuroscientist Gray Walter.
In the early fifties of the last century, Dr. Walter's electromechanical "turtles", developed by him to study the reflexes and behavioral mechanisms of living beings, caused a real stir among the inhabitants, introducing ordinary people to the concepts of "cybernetics", "artificial intelligence" and "artificial life" and revealing for them boundless horizons of science.
Gray Walter. Neurophysiologist with locksmith hands
1951 The British Science Festival is a large-scale exhibition of scientific achievements of British scientists on the south bank of the Thames. The purpose of the exhibition is to show people who have just survived the horrors of war that progress does not stand still and the scientific achievements of the present will help build a beautiful world of the future.
Numerous visitors to the exhibition invariably crowd near the pavilion with turtle robots - mechanical creatures that nevertheless behave as if they were alive. Rotating the only eye-periscope, the turtles confidently move towards the source of light - their "food", and when they stumble upon any obstacle, they diligently bypass it.
The 1951 British Science Festival poster depicts ELSIE Turtles.
Newspapers excitedly describe interesting facts related to turtle robots. So, these creatures like women more than men, they cling to their feet. "Hungry", turtle robots tend to the light, to their house, where there is a charger for their batteries. But if the room is too light or camera flashes are triggered, these creatures get lost and begin to rush about in search of shelter.
Demonstration of turtle robots at the exhibition was carried out by their creator - thirty-eight-year-old Dr. Gray Walter. Moreover, "doctor" does not mean a scientific degree: Gray Walter is a neurophysiologist.
In 1951, Dr. Gray Walter headed the Department of Neurophysiology at the Bourdain Institute.
In 1951, Dr. Walter - a leading researcher at the Bourdain Neurological Institute in Bristol, a pioneer in the field of brain electroencephalography - the latest direction in the study of higher human nervous activity.
Gray Walter, the son of a British journalist and a US journalist who met in Italy during World War I, was born in Kansas City but spent his entire adult life in England. In 1928, having graduated from King's College, Cambridge with a degree in physiology, Walter continued to work on a dissertation on the psychophysiology of nervous activity and reflexes.
Gray Walter's interest in this area is not accidental. While still a college student, he visited Russia, in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. The results of the studies of the great Russian physiologist related to reflex activity determined the direction of further research by Dr. Walter.
Having taken up brain electroencephalography (EEG) at the Bourdain Institute, Gray Walter proves himself not only as a brilliant neurophysiologist, having discovered, for example, delta and theta brain rhythms, but also as ... an excellent locksmith. Most of the devices needed for the study (EEG) he makes on his own in a small metalwork workshop of the institute.
During the Second World War, the knowledge and experience of Gray Walter is directed to the treatment and rehabilitation of people with traumatic brain injuries. After its completion, he resumes research related to reflex behavior and the work of the "bricks" of the brain - neurons.
Perceiving the brain as a complex control system, Walter wants to demonstrate that the behavior of living beings is associated with the constant processing of information coming from outside and the decision on further actions, which is transmitted to the executive mechanisms - the muscles.
It was then that Dr. Walter had the desire to simulate neural activity, to create "artificial life." This is where his skills as a mechanic and electrical engineer come in handy, fixed during the design of the first electroencephalographs.
ELMER, ELSIE, CORA, IRMA and... Wiener
Admittedly, electromechanical mechanisms with sensory feedback were created before Walter's creations. So, in 1928, demonstrating the then achievements of radio electronics, the Philips Radio concern released the Philips Radio Dog, or, in short, Philidog. A feature of this electromechanical toy was the use of a photocathode as a light sensor. Thanks to him, the Philips radio dog followed a light source, such as a flashlight in the owner's hand.
It is unlikely that Philidog's behavior can be called conscious. Rather, it was a machine gun, packed in a toy case.
Gray Walter, on the other hand, planned to model conscious behavior, based on his extensive knowledge of neurophysiology. And he did it! His first creation was ELMER (short for ElectroMechanical Robot). Assembled literally from what was at hand, Elmer was a three-wheeled cart with an electric drive of the front wheel, the movement and rotation of which was controlled by two "neurons" - circuits based on a tube amplifier and a relay.
Meanwhile, Gray Walter was adding complexity to his robotic turtles. His next creation, CORA (from Conditioned Reflex Analogue), was experimental and did not receive as much public acceptance as ELSIE. Meanwhile, it was CORA that struck its own creator, demonstrating the rudiments of unprogrammed behavior. The purpose of creating CORA was to simulate the development of a conditioned reflex.
And if Walter called ELMER and ELSIE Machina Speculatrix (researcher machine), then the name Machina Docilis was quite suitable for CORA - a machine capable of learning.
In addition to the photosensor and the touch sensor, CORA had a microphone tuned to sound at a certain frequency. And her "neural" scheme was complicated, having received a semblance of short-term memory. When the turtle bumped into an obstacle, the researcher reinforced this event by blowing a police whistle (it was the frequency at which the third CORA amplifier was tuned). The differentiation of two sensory influences was memorized by the robot in the form of a single reaction - bypassing an obstacle.
The "miracle" happened after the explorer removed the obstacle. The whistle forced CORA to go around a non-existent stool, thus demonstrating the development of a conditioned reflex.
Meanwhile, Gray Walter tried to complicate the behavior of CORA. He used the fact that English police whistles are two-tone. It was on the second tone of the whistle that Walter tuned another CORA auditory circuit, connecting it with the search for a light source. Now he practiced CORA by making one whistle before the turtle touched the obstacle and another before it detected the light.
But what happens if you specify two holes at once, giving out two tones at the same time? CORA's response to this dilemma was very similar to that of a living being. As a result of processing such conflicting information, the turtle huddled in a dark corner, moving nervously in it, as if to calm the sensory overload. And only after the passage of time her contours returned to normal and she regained peace and the ability to look for a "feeder".
Dr. Walter has spent a lot of time researching the behavior of CORA. In particular, he tried to train her to overcome the maze.
Walter's last robotic turtle was IRMA (Innate Releasing Mechanism Analogue). With the help of several instances of IRMA, the neurophysiologist tried to investigate aspects of the behavior of living beings in a group of their own kind. A feature of IRMA was the adaptation of her behavior in the group during the joint search for a light source.
Today, we call such mechanisms autonomous agents, or "animats", but in Walter's time, cybernetics was just getting on its feet. And the English neurophysiologist unwittingly became its apologist in Great Britain.
Thanks to the wide public fame of his turtle robots, he attracted the attention of both overseas cyberneticists in the person of Norbert Wiener and compatriots - scientists involved in adaptive control systems in the interests of the military department, in the person of Kenneth Craik.
It was thanks to the latter that Gray Walter got into the "closed club" Ratio Club - a community of scientists dealing with cybernetics in the UK. The Ratio Club lasted from 1949 to 1955; In addition to Craik, it included neurosurgeon John Bates, who worked with Craik on automatic servos for air defense gun mounts, William Ashby and Alan Turing, who carried out government orders to decipher Nazi radio messages.
The Ratio Club had close ties to the American cybernetic community. So close that Walter once managed to take an electroencephalogram of the activity of the brain of Norbert Wiener, who had a tendency to spontaneously fall asleep in the most inadequate environment (for example, during lectures), and found out that the brain of the father of cybernetics during such a dream is in a waking state and is able to adequately process information.
The public fame of Gray Walter and his turtle robots was not to the liking of the members of the Ratio Club, who discussed the country's defense capability at meetings, but Dr. Walter looked at the problems of the adaptive behavior of technical systems more broadly and was convinced that the popularization of the achievements of cybernetics is not the key to technological progress. only a single nation, but the whole of humanity.
The spiral of technological development is an amazing thing. The work of Gray Walter within the framework of the Ratio Club and his meeting with Norbert Wiener led to the streamlining of the neuropsychological thoughts of the scientist at first, to a single cybernetic basis. But his work also had a significant impact on the development of cybernetics. Inspired by Walter's turtle robots, American cybernetics developed his ideas and continued the principles of science popularization laid down by him. Behind the next turn of the technological spiral was Edmund Berkeley, the creator of the electromechanical brain and the theory of "living robots". But this is a completely different story.
The problem of human abilities has always and in all people aroused genuine interest. Where do capable and incapable people, talented and mediocre people come from? Why does not every child prodigy become a genius, while geniuses in all areas of human activity are so rare? Who hasn't asked themselves these questions? But if earlier these questions did not go beyond curiosity and did not need much resolution, now the problem of abilities is growing into a major social problem. Why?
The acceleration of scientific and technological progress, unprecedented in the history of mankind, the avalanche-like growth of our knowledge of the world and the need to master it, have already set a number of very difficult tasks for educators and psychologists. The school at all its levels - primary, secondary and higher - lags behind the requirements of life in this respect, and the lag not only does not tend to decrease, but is progressing more and more noticeably.
Anyone who is familiar with the state of affairs in the school, it is clear that it is impossible to compensate for this lag by increasing the duration of training or by replenishing the programs with new material. The duration of schooling has already reached those extreme limits, where it can be considered still reasonable with a stretch, and it is not by chance that it has been at this level for more than a decade. A second attempt is made to introduce the eleventh grade in the school. The issue of overloading school programs has been on our agenda for many years and strongly makes itself felt, if only in the fact that the working day of a schoolchild in high school exceeds the length of an adult’s working day guaranteed by the Constitution and threatens not only the physical, but also the mental the health of our children. If we had in our hands objective criteria for measuring the measure of both health, we would have been talking about this for a long time and with more anxiety than now.
True, there is another way - a radical improvement in the educational process itself at school - combining education with productive labor, when work and study will be equalized in rights and children will rest for half a day from the tedious and unnatural monotony of book study and thereby preserve the freshness and ease of children's perception and high rates of development. But this time will come, apparently, not soon, since the school reform of 1984 provides for the allocation not even for labor, but only for labor training, a tiny part of the study time (10-15%).
Other measures, such as programmed learning and the transition to new programs (which also turned out to be far from perfect), did not justify the hopes placed on them. All these, of course, are steps forward, but the steps are simply not commensurate with the powerful pace of scientific and technological progress.
The problem is further complicated by the fact that it is far from being exhausted by one continuously growing body of knowledge. It turns out that even extensive knowledge alone is no longer enough for the full-fledged training of modern workers in the field of science, technology and production. We need more and more people who are not only knowledgeable, but capable of creative activity, specialists of high creative potential. Neither secondary nor higher schools have yet been directed to their selection and appropriate training. Where to take them from? Unfortunately, teachers and psychologists are not in a hurry to resolve this issue. And life does not wait.
And now mathematicians, cybernetics, and behind them physicists, chemists are already creating special schools and looking for capable students for them. Long, hard work. Talents, like diamonds, are now quite rare, and polishing them is not easy, but so far this is the only possibility.
The problem of creative abilities has now come to the fore in front of workers in science and technology, but, undoubtedly, it will soon become in front of many others. And if we take into account the fact that knowledge has a shortened "lifetime", that knowledge is beginning to grow old faster and requires constant "renewal", that some professions are dying before our eyes and other professions are being born, that the share of mental labor and creative activity of people in almost all professions tends to grow, and accelerated growth, this means that the creative abilities of a person should be recognized as the most significant part of his intellect and the task of their development is one of the most important tasks in educating a person of the future.
It is possible that everything that has been said is familiar and understandable to people who follow the anxieties of our social thought, but I would like to see concerns added to the anxieties; in one way or another aimed at solving the problem. Not only the state is interested in its solution: almost every teacher and parent is interested in the development of children's abilities, including creative ones.
But here on the way to solving the problem, among other obstacles, there is one very significant one - the modern hypothesis of abilities. Why is she an obstacle?
Guided by this or that hypothesis, people act. and these actions may in some cases bring them closer to the goal, and in others away from it, or, as they say, "they will be led by the nose for a long time" until new facts force them to abandon the wrong hypothesis. Some hypotheses put a person in an active position, make him search, explore, experiment, others, on the contrary, say that this phenomenon does not obey us, that everything or almost everything depends on nature, on heredity.
Such an approximate hypothesis is the hypothesis of abilities existing in psychology and pedagogy. You can understand its essence from the definitions of three main concepts: abilities, inclinations and giftedness.
"ABILITIES - individual characteristics of a person, on which the success of certain types of activities depends ... Abilities are not given by nature in a finished form ... INDIVIDUALS are of great importance for their development, but in the end, abilities can be formed only in certain conditions of life and activities..."
"Inclinations - congenital anatomical and physiological features, among which the most important are the characteristics of the nervous system and the processes occurring in it. Inclinations are important for the development of abilities." Such a definition is given by the Pedagogical Dictionary (vol. 1, p. 388). And the "Pedagogical Encyclopedia" (ed. 1966) directly calls them "natural prerequisites for the development of the organism", "the organic basis of abilities" (vol. 2, p. 62).
"Giftedness - (according to the definition of the "Pedagogical Dictionary", vol. 11, p. 35) - a set of natural inclinations as one of the conditions for the formation of abilities", and according to the definition of the "Pedagogical Encyclopedia" (vol. 3, p. 186) - "high the level of development of a person's abilities that allows him to achieve special success in certain areas of activity.
The confusion in the definition of giftedness is apparently not accidental: it reflects the confusion that really exists in psychological science on the question of abilities. Nevertheless, from these definitions one can see that the main conditions for the formation of abilities are considered to be natural inclinations and conditions of life and activity. If there is the first and second, then abilities can be formed, and if at least one is missing, then they will not be formed. The presence of the makings of a child cannot be determined by any means. What remains to be done by parents, kindergarten and school? Apparently, create conditions conducive to the development of abilities, and wait. Wait for the abilities to "manifest". What if they don't show up? This means that there are no inclinations, or you have created conditions not for those inclinations that the child has.
Try to figure it out! In short, people are placed in a passive position by such a hypothesis.
Now about the essence of makings. “If this concept is anatomical and physiological, then for the psychologist it makes sense only as a reference to the area in which he does not deal. At the same time, this is the assumption that since there are abilities, then something must exist before they appear. This is something and there are innate prerequisites - inclinations. Such an understanding gives nothing to psychology and has no basis in factual data, "says Professor V. N. Myasishchev, corresponding member of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, and adds: "In numerous studies on the physiology of the higher nervous one study that would raise the question of those physiological characteristics that are associated with the concept of ability "(emphasized by me. B.N.). In other words, the existing hypothesis of abilities is still speculative.
At different times, different assumptions were born from different facts. It was believed, for example, that abilities depend on the volume of brain matter, since in many talented and brilliant people the brain volume exceeded the usual human norm of 1400 cm3 and reached 1800 cm3 (for the writer I. S. Turgenev). But there were such facts nearby when a man of genius had a brain of 1200 cm3 or even lived with one half of the brain, like Pasteur, in whom only one hemisphere functioned after a brain hemorrhage, and such a hypothesis could not explain them. Then they turned to the structure of the cells of the brain, especially its cortex, and found that brilliant people sometimes have differences from the usual structure, but which of these differences are of decisive importance remained a mystery.
It was also assumed, for example, that the first child in the family was the most talented. And this hypothesis had adherents until statistics came to the rescue. Of the 74 world-famous brilliant and talented people, from whose biographical data it was possible to establish how he was born, only five turned out to be the first - Milton, Leonardo da Vinci, G. Heine, Brahms, A. Rubinstein.
And Franklin was the 17th child in the family,
Mendeleev - 17th
Mechnikov - 16th
Schubert - 13th
Washington - 11th
Sarah Bernard - 11th
Carl Weber - 9th
Napoleon - 8th
Rubens - 7th, etc.
This means that the point is not in what number the child was born in the family, but in something else.
The hypothesis of the inheritance of abilities turned out to be very tenacious. The abundance of contradictory facts does not confuse its supporters. In five generations of the Bach family, in addition to Johann Sebastian, there were 56 (according to other sources - 15) talented musicians. And the same thing can be observed, albeit to a lesser extent, in other families of talented people. But there are also diametrically opposed facts, for example, the genus of Schumann. Of the 136 members of this family, in four generations there was ... only one musician - Robert Schumann, his wife Clara was also a talented pianist, but none of their eight children became a musician. Why? Why in the Tolstoy family only Lev Nikolaevich turned out to be a genius?
It is difficult to answer these questions, and to answer convincingly. The modern hypothesis therefore prefers to pass over such questions in silence. At the same time, it must be taken into account that abilities are rather persistent features that change little during a person's life itself. If mathematics is difficult for a child in elementary school, then this quality is retained for him in all senior grades. With all the hard work, efficiency, accuracy and other virtues, you cannot make such a student capable, say the teachers. And for the vast majority of cases this is true, exceptions are extremely rare.
"Innate intelligence" - this is how not only bourgeois scientists explain this phenomenon. "Talent, talent, say, in work in the field of mathematics, physical experiment, designing new devices are given by nature in everything. No hard work can replace this natural talent," says Academician A. Kolmogorov. If we agree with this statement, then it is natural to assume that "natural talent", for example, for scientific activity can only be among peoples who have long since left the wild state and, therefore, have acquired some qualities for scientific activity over a long period of their historical development. . But then how to explain this kind of fact: "Marie Ivoin, a girl who was brought from the depths of the forests of Central America by the expedition of Velar (at the age of several months), was from the Guaiquil tribe, the most backward on the entire globe, but in France she turned into an intelligent and a cultured woman - a scientific worker by profession".
Geneticists, who have made major discoveries in the field of heredity in recent years, are also not unanimous in their opinions. Professor of genetics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, S. Auerbach, argues: "Everything that is correct regarding the properties of the body is also true for the traits of the mind and emotions. The level of mental development, special abilities, personal qualities - all this is the result of the interaction of genetic factors and environmental factors." And the rector of the University of Chicago, Nobel Prize winner George W. Beadle separates "biological" from "cultural" heredity. The gulf between man and his closest relatives from the animal world is enormous... Under the influence of the cultural environment, the human central nervous system develops in an extremely specific way.
Our brain, like the brain of the species that preceded and related to us, contains "innate information" that regulates such bodily functions as respiration, blood circulation, instinctive behavior, etc. But, in addition to this information, the human brain, unlike the animal brain contains a huge amount of "perceived information", which is the cultural heritage ... In contrast to the biological, the cultural heredity acquired by a person is renewed in each new generation. The beadle thus leaves very little to heredity and very much to education.
Even more clearly separated "biological inheritance" from "social" our geneticist N. P. Dubinin. “That ideal (i.e. social) content that fills the psyche in the course of personality formation is not recorded in the human genetic program. The brain has unlimited possibilities for perceiving a versatile social program, ensures the universal readiness of the newborn to connect to the social form of the movement of matter. Thus, this colossal potential is the task of education.
This relatively complex formulation is somewhat explained by the second: “There are no genes for the spiritual content of a person, the features of the human psyche are formed with the help of people’s social and practical activities. Understanding this opens up enormous prospects for pedagogy and for the formation of a new person. this concerns, in particular, the development of personality at an early age (up to two years).
Unfortunately, N. P. Dubinin's article came out later (in 1980) than the "ability hypothesis" was formulated, and this made the whole work on the problem much more difficult and complicated. We had to solve all problems without this fundamental theoretical support. That's why the search is complicated, that's why there are so many questions.
How to explain from the standpoint of the old hypothesis such a series of facts: very often preschoolers and younger schoolchildren amaze adults with an early manifestation of creative abilities. But years go by, children grow up, and... neither talented, nor even brilliant people come out of them. Where do their abilities and inclinations go? Why, for example, do the vast majority of children who are brought up in orphanages and children's homes lag far behind in the development of speech, and then do poorly in school? This has long been noted by researchers in many European countries. Aren't these children the same as everyone else, and deprived of the inclinations that make it possible to develop the ability to speak and study at school?
Why do pupils from several "special" schools in the Moscow region enter the mathematical schools of Moscow every year through a competition?
Why, among Russian students, about one-third do not have an ear for music, while among Vietnamese students there are none?
Why do some people think that only 1-2% of boys and girls can be scientists in the field of mathematics (Academician A. Kolmogorov), while others - 60-80% (teacher K. Skorokhod)?
There are a lot of similar questions to which the existing hypothesis of abilities cannot give a satisfactory answer.
His famous cybernetic "turtles" English neurophysiologist and pioneer of robotics Gray Walter (William Gray Walter) began creating in 1948 and continued his experiments with biomorphic robots until 1951. Gray Walter called them machina speculatrix, but they went down in history as "turtles". "Turtles" were self-propelled electromechanical carts capable of crawling into or away from light, bypassing obstacles, and entering a "feeder" to recharge discharged batteries. Gray Walter's autonomous cars really resembled turtles in their appearance and slowness of action. Their main difference was the ability to act not only according to a "rigid", predetermined program, as most of the robots created at that time acted, but also taking into account the conditions determined by the situation, the environment.
The father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, in his famous book I am a Mathematician, describes Walter's work in the following way: "Having grasped the analogy between the feedback in a machine and the human nervous system at about the same time as me, Walter began to design mechanisms that which would replicate some of the behavior of animals.I worked on creating a "moth" that would automatically crawl into the light.Walter called his automata "turtles", incorporating more complex numbers into their repertoire."Turtles" were equipped with a device to help them not to collide with each other when moving, and, in addition, a device due to which, feeling "hunger", i.e. depletion of the batteries, they went to a special "feeding place", where they swallowed electricity until the batteries were recharged ".
In total, Gray Walter created more than 8 "turtles". The first of the "turtles" - Elmer (Elmer - an electromechanical robot) - was made in the form of a small three-wheeled cart, on which two electric motors powered by batteries were installed. The first engine provided the translational movement of the device, the second, located on the steering column, changed the direction of movement. The motors were controlled by electromagnetic relays. The sensitive elements of the "turtle" were a photocell located on the steering column, and a mechanical contact closed when hitting an obstacle. Behavior was controlled by an electronic feedback circuit built on just two artificial neurons.
Despite the simple device, the "turtle" showed meaningful and sometimes very funny behavior based on three states: the search for light ("hunger"), turning towards the light, avoidance of bright light and obstacles ("pain").
While the turtle's battery was charged, it behaved like a well-fed animal: in low light or in the dark, it slowly moved around the room, as if looking for something; when it collides with any obstacle (buffet, table leg, etc.), it stops, turns to the side and bypasses this obstacle. If a bright light source appeared in the room, Elmer soon “notices” it and moves towards the light (positive tropism). (To learn how to make a simple robot that reacts to light, read the article "How to make a robot: The simplest robot on a single chip".) However, when he got too close to the light, he turned away from it, "afraid" of blinding (negative tropism) . Then he moved around the light source, finding the optimal conditions for himself and continuously maintaining them (homeostasis). As the battery discharged, the turtle began to show more and more interest in the light source, as it illuminated the "feeder" - a place to charge the battery. When the battery was so low that it needed to be recharged, the turtle boldly walked to the light source and connected to the power contacts of the charger. Having received "food" - a new supply of electricity, she moved away from the charger and again wandered around the room in search of an unlit corner.
Another turtle - Elsie (Elsie - Electro-Light sensitiv - an electro-light-sensitive robot) - behaved a little differently: it reacted more actively to the slightest changes in illumination, moved faster and more, expended more energy and visited the feeder more often.
Between two sources of light, the "turtles" traveled from one to the other, like the Buridan donkey, which, as you know, starved to death, being between two identical haystacks, not being able to choose which one is tastier. Two turtles "saw" and "recognized" each other by a lit light bulb and crawled towards each other.
Scheme of a robotic turtle on vacuum tubes.
Even more interesting was the third turtle - Cora (Cora - Conditional Reflex Automat - conditioned reflex machine). This cybernetic animal possessed not only "vision" and "touch", but also "hearing": Gray Walter added a microphone to its senses. In addition, it could be trained by developing something like a conditioned reflex (due to the presence of a memory element in the form of a capacitor, capable of storing the accumulated electric charge for some time).
As you know, a conditioned reflex is the result of learning, habits. No wonder the British call it Learned reflex, that is, a learned, learned reflex. If you repeat the demonstration of the conditioned reflex many times without reinforcing it, i.e., without conducting the joint action of the unconditioned and conditioned stimuli from time to time, then the conditioned reflex fades (forgets) and eventually disappears completely.
Walter developed a conditioned reflex in his turtle Cora, teaching her to stop in front of an obstacle and turn to the side on a sound signal - a whistle. To do this, he gave a signal (whistle) whenever the Cora, while moving around the room, ran into any obstacle. At first, the turtle ignored the whistles. However, she soon developed a conditioned reflex: at the signal of the whistle, she stopped, stepped back and turned to the side, even if there was no obstacle in front of her. But the conditioned reflex developed in this way soon disappeared if Cora was often deceived by blowing a whistle signal in the absence of an obstacle in front of her.
The behavior demonstrated by Gray Walter's robots gave them a great resemblance to real living beings, the distinguishing feature of which is precisely the ability to act expediently, taking into account the environment. The interaction between the "nervous system" of his "turtles" and the environment created unexpected and complex behavior. "Turtles" never exactly repeated their behavior, but always acted within the framework of a common behavioral pattern in the way that living creatures do.
Turtle trajectories.
In the future, such devices that simulate the behavior of living organisms have become the subject of close attention and study. The mouse is widely known for finding its way through the maze built by the American mathematician and cyberneticist Claude Elwood Shannon; a squirrel that collects nuts and carries them to the nest, created by the American Edmund Berkeley (Edmund Berkeley); electronic foxes Barbara and Job, made by the French physicist Albert Ducrocq, Eichler's turtle, which could respond to light, sound and touch (simultaneous exposure to two stimuli - touch and sound - caused a conditioned reflex). The original turtle was built by employees of the Institute of Automation and Telemechanics of the USSR Academy of Sciences R.R. Vasiliev and A.P. Petrovsky.
Also in this area, it is worth noting the work of the Italian neurologist and cybernetics Valentino Braitenberg on synthesizing biological behavior with simple schemes. His book "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" (1984) became a classic that inspired many researchers.
The creation of biomorphic robots based on the principles of the functioning of biological systems was subsequently carried out by the outstanding roboticists Rodney Brooks, director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Mark W. Tilden, the creator of BEAM technology - a new paradigm in modern robotics. They own the ideas of creating robotic systems based on reflexes, implemented at a low hardware level.
In 2006, an interesting opinion was expressed by the Cambridge scientist Lambros Malafouris in his article "The Cognitive Basis of Material Engagement: Where Brain, Body, and Culture Conflate". The reason why Gray Walter's turtle robots worked so well already in the mid-1950s (at a time when conventional artificial intelligence usually failed) is Malafuris theorizes that consciousness requires a feedback circuit to form consciousness. brain-body-environment connections. Traditional artificial intelligence has tried to isolate consciousness as "an incorporeal ghost processing information." Gray Walter's autonomous machina speculatrix was based less on Turing than on Norbert Weiner's cybernetic feedback. So it's not surprising that Walter's "turtles" exhibited the kind of unexpected and varied behavior that can be found in nature.