Robot Recognizes Its Own Mirror Image

Though substantially overhyped in this article

"
Robot Demonstrates Self Awareness
By Tracy Staedter, Discovery News
"

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20051219/awarerobot_tec.html?source=rss

this robot that recognizes its own mirror image and in this sense can distinguish "self from other" is still an interesting achievement, since it was done via adaptive hierarchical neural nets rather than any kind of total "cheating" methodology.

Still, my bet is that the way this little bot achieves self-recognition bears fairly little resemblance to how humans, apes or dolphins do it (these are the only species that seem to be able to consistently carry out this cognitive feat:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0002433B-A643-1C5E-B882809EC588ED9F

)

Perhaps this line of research will lead to a branch of cognitive robotics focused on "distributed cognition"

(cf.
http://www-sv.cict.fr/cotcos/pjs/TheoreticalApproaches/DistributedCog/DistributedCogIntro.htm
)

This is the sort of thing my colleagues and I will experiment with using our Novamente AI system in the AGISIM simulation world, as the NM/AGISIM connection matures. (But AGISIM doesn't support mirrors yet!)

-- Ben Goertzel