They are working on a real "Astroboy".

[wicked fierce]

I read this in a magazine a few months ago and just remembered this. Has anyone heard anything about this?

What I heard was that they are making it in Japan. It's funded by the government and it'll cost them 30 million a year for like 30 years. I could be wrong with the details though because I read that article a few months ago.

[jeffbert]

It would help if you could give some details about the article.

I find several about this subject. all you need to know about robots

here are the paragraphs about Atom:

atom
japanese researchers are advocating a grand project,
under which the government would spend 50 billion
yen a year over three decades to develop a humanoid
robot with the mental, physical and emotional capacity
of a 5-year-old human - the atom project.



'most of today's robots operate with a program written by
humans. in order to develop a robot that can think and
move like a 5-year-old, we have to first understand the
mechanism of how human brains work,' mitsuo kawato,
chief of the computational neuroscience laboratories
at the kyoto-based advanced telecommunications
research institute internationa said, admitting the difficulty
of his project. 'that will be equal to understanding
human beings.'

tthe project was inspired by the popular robot animation series
'tetsuwan atom' by the late cartoonist osamu tezuka
(unlike cartoonist tezuka's 'atom' character, known as
'astro boy' overseas, based on an image of a 9-year-old
boy, the atom project aims to create a humanoid robot
with the physical, intellectual and emotional capacity of
a 5-year-old that would be able to think and move on its
own). the researchers say it would help promote scientific
and technological advances in japan, just like the u.s.
apollo project, which not only succeeded in landing men
on the moon but contributed to a broad range of technological
breakthroughs - a project of this magnitude would inject
much-needed vigor into a nation depressed from years of
economic slump.

What a rip-off that I was born 75 years too early!
:angry:

Johns Hopkins University is offering 450.750 The Artificial Human in Science, Myth, and Literature. The course description says nothing about either Tezuka or Atom, though.

[wicked fierce]

Ah yes, that's the one. I knew one of you Astropros would have heard about this. That's the info that I read.

****, I'll be like 54 when he's done. Still, you never know, they might not even take 30 years for it.

[Anapan]

Honda, Sony and quite a few other companies have been working on developing small humanoid robots for many years already. So far the most impressive one I've seen is the Sony Dream Robot (latest model is called the SDR-4X), built using mostly the same parts as their popular programmable dog-robot Aibo.
I stuck a few videos of those robots on my FTP that I found kicking around on my harddrive.
They're in the misc directory.
If anyone's interested I have alot more pictures and videos on some old backup CDs somewhere.

[jeffbert]

Ah yes, that's the one. I knew one of you Astropros would have heard about this. That's the info that I read.

Actually, I had not known of this until I read your post. Dead or alive, I will be in my 70s. :angry:

[Dragonrider1227]

I'll be like, 50 if this Atom gets completed. Of course, if we can be this close to an Astro, how close can we be to an Atlas? Kinda makes you think. But a long as this Atom doesn't have real lasers in his fingers or machine guns in his butt, I suppose we'll be alright.

[miata1]

never heard of an actual robot being developed that had his abilities but I thought I heard that there was supposed to be a movie version of astroboy coming out in either 2004 or 2005. maybe i heard wrong too but that's what I thought I heard.

[Dragonrider1227]

There is talk of a movie. So, you were right.

[DrFrag]

I bet they end up using a neural net for the brain.

[jeffbert]

I had been thinking about the vast complexity of human thought processes. Just one area, that of classifications and associations is itself very complex. If you see a new type of fruit, you will immediately try to fit it into a class. Is it nearly spherical, or long and thin? Does it resemble a banana or an orange? To what would you liken its flavor? Is it sweet, tart, sour, or what?

Suppose you looked into the sky and saw a military helicopter, long, thin, and with lifting rotors at both front and back. Would you call it a flying banana? (its true nickname).

The computer language C++ has data structures called classes. These allow development of programs based upon the characteristics of the things they represent. A sphere would derive from a circle, which itself would derive from a point. An orange would use this class, sphere, but would likewise use other classes to describe its other characteristics. The human mind can create objects with any number of classes, and can always add more on the fly. As a memory, an orange may associate with any number of other memories, from the place where you first tasted one, to the situation in which that occurred. I do not know if any computer language exists that supports infdefinite data associations. Normally, the programmer would create all those classes and sub-classes when writing the program. The ability to make an association between one object in memory and another may well be the one thing that cannot be done efficiently if at all in computers.

Thus, making a robotic 5-year old may be quite a bit harder than merely creating programs to mimic human behavior (that is behariour for you mates). Creating Deep Blue that defeated Chess Grand Master Gary Kasperov, will be a nothing compared to making a true child-like robot!