I have a photo album that my father put together for me many years ago. I should go through it and dredge up the memories... and attach them to the dates on the pictures.
For now, I remember just one image. Me sitting next to a cardboard "robot head". I was what, eleven? twelve?
I've always wanted to create life, in the form of robots or whatever.
When I was little (and probably not so little, too) my grandmother indulged me in mixing junk from the cupboards (e.g. spices) together as "experiments". Yeah, it was stupid, but I was a kid! And my grandma indulged me a lot. She was great.
Anyway, I never said so, but I always imagined that I was creating life doing this. Primordial soup, as it were.
Also when I was little in Long Beach (damn, I don't know when, don't worry about it) I would play with the metal wind-up robot toys that my great-grandmother had. Just a couple, I think.
I recall that, yeah, they were robots, but not *real* robots. They were single purpose. I wanted to make *real* robots, like people, capable of doing anything.
I played with ideas in cardboard, but these came to nothing as might be expected.
The cardboard robot head was a puppet thing, or at least a fun toy, not a serious attempt at robotics. I did puppets briefly, making a few muppet-like critters and even putting on a show or two. Badly, I'm sure, but the grownups gave me encouragement.
In my pre-teens, eleven and twelve, I would slake the horrible boredom of church by doodling out boolean circuits on some paper. The other kids would complain, saying "we know you are smart, you don't have to go on proving it". Whatever. I was bored, I wanted to keep my brain busy. It had nothing to do with them. It was all about me.
I remember I created an adder circuit. If built, it would probably have timing issues, but it was an interesting exercise.
When I was about eleven I started building a robot. I got a couple of powered wheels from god knows where. I got a motorcycle battery, thanks to an influx of cash from my grandmother. I built a platform to hold these. I think I built that in Orange County, but most of the work actually occured in Long Beach, where we lived with my Grandparents, Aunt, and Great Grandparents. I wish someone could come in here and correct my times and places...
In Long Beach, I needed a brain for this beast. I read and re-read my only book on the subject, something like "How to Build your Own Homegrown Robot" by, I dunno, Heiserman or someone.
(I just looked this up. It was probably the "How to Build your own Working Robot" by David L. Heiserman, 1976.)
But that book was just too much for a twelve-year-old. At least me, at that age. I couldn't wrestle all the details into focus. Remember, I was bright but still suffering from amazing stress, which limited me in many ways.
When I was about twelve, my dad helped me buy (by providing most of the cash) my first computer, a Kim-I. The computer came pre-assembled but I had to build the power supply. The first try, I put in the big electrolytic capacitor backwards. Damn, when that blew I just about shit a brick.
The second time worked much better.
I learned to program on that bad boy, hand assembling opcodes into hex and then punching them into memory on the hex keypad. Most of the programs I took from magazines, such as the asteroids game (played on the display, which was six seven-segment LEDs, I kid you not) and wumpus.
A year later we got an Apple II computer. I transfered my learning to that and eventually put all of my robotic aspirations behind me. Robots were expensive and I had no cash flow. Programming, a vital first step towards brains, was cheap and I had computers.
My fascination with creating life and robots has never left me, and in fact was re-kindled when I discovered Robot Wars in the late '90s.
A tour of Amazon.com will show you where THAT has led me.
But I have not yet built that intelligent machine I've always dreamt of, neither raw AI or robot.
I'm not dead yet, so there is still hope.
Posted by Edwin at December 29, 2004 03:42 PM