Two Minds Blog

MIT Roboticist Rodney Brooks described the development of autonomous robots in his paper " fast, cheap, and out of control ." According to Brooks, when engineers first set out to design robots that could move independently through a built environment, they assumed that they would need to program every feature of that environment into a pre-set map representing the complex external environment inside the robot’s software. The problem was that they could never get this approach to work. It took up too much room in the robot’s limited memory, and too much time for the robot to access map data on the fly. Its processor would still be sifting through information while its wheels ran it off the top of a stairwell or into a wall. The robotics team was ultimately successful with a much simpler approach: They gave the robot sensors and some simple rules for how to react to its environment. This is exactly how the well-known Roomba vacuum cleaner works: It sets off in a particul...

Creativity has been defined as the intersection of novelty with appropriateness . The concept of “novelty” is relative: Things that are purely new  often seem strange or out-of-place. For example, why would a chemist suddenly begin talking about snakes? But the chemist Kekule did just that, describing the ring structure of carbon atoms in the benzene molecule as “a snake biting its own tail.” Kekule said that this image came to him in a dream , as the solution to a problem that he had long been pondering. He knew from empirical research exactly how many carbon atoms and how many hydrogen atoms the molecule needed to contain, but he hadn’t previously been able to explain how they fit together. The “snake biting its tail” image provided an elegant solution to his problem. Novelty may not be something one can consciously develop — just try sitting down with a blank piece of paper and making a deliberate effort to "be creative." Truly innovative ideas more often seem to em...