Posts tagged children

Children Beating Up Robot Inspires New Escape Maneuver System

IEEE, robotics, social robotics, HRI, children, child psychology, learning, play, engineering, Lord

Next, they designed an abuse-evading algorithm to help the robot avoid situations where tiny humans might gang up on it. Literally tiny humans: the robot is programmed to run away from people who are below a certain height and escape in the direction of taller people. When it encounters a human, the system calculates the probability of abuse based on interaction time, pedestrian density, and the presence of people above or below 1.4 meters (4 feet 6 inches) in height. If the robot is statistically in danger, it changes its course towards a more crowded area or a taller person. This ensures that an adult is there to intervene when one of the little brats decides to pound the robot’s head with a bottle (which only happened a couple times).

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/children-beating-up-robot

The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth

Carcinisation, culture, children, internet, isolationism, adult culture, children's culture, explor

Children’s society exists on the internet if at all, with raids in video games and chat rooms replacing geographically colocated monster hunts. (This is increasingly the case with adult society as well, which also lacks architectural and geographic support.) It should be noted that the internet is not the cause of these problems. Rather, the internet is the precarious reservation onto which culture has been driven, bleak and uncanny, inhuman in scale. And even the internet is increasingly monitored and reshaped by the same malignant tiling system that drove culture here in the first place. What will happen to culture when even this frontier is closed?

http://carcinisation.com/2014/10/04/the-last-of-the-monsters-with-iron-teeth/

How Videogames Blind Us With Science

science, scientific method, games, gaming, reason, reasoning, children, education

More than half the gamers used “systems-based reasoning” – analyzing the game as a complex, dynamic system. And one-tenth actually constructed specific models to explain the behavior of a monster or situation; they would often use their model to generate predictions. Meanwhile, one-quarter of the commentors would build on someone else’s previous argument, and another quarter would issue rebuttals of previous arguments and models.

http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2008/09/gamesfrontiers_0908