Gomi no sensei des
(5 April 2003)

Loosely translated from Japanese, it means "I am the master of junk" and was an e-mail tag line used by Mark Tilden, the originator of BEAM robotics for quite some time. A similar line was also used by William Gibson in "Winter Market", a futuristic story based in the streets of Vancouver, BC (Canada) in a future where recycling technology is a way of survival. Today, Gibson's vision of the future may be edging closer to reality thanks to creative roboticists like Mark Tilden and his followers.

Many, many moons (about 8 years) ago Mark Tilden, a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) co-authored a paper with colleague Brosl Hasslacher entitled "Living Machines" that threw a wrinkle into commonly held beliefs about intelligence, complexity, and robotics. The result has been a new branch of robotics known as BEAM for Biology Electronics Aesthetics and Mechanics. It stresses the use of reactive electronic neuron clusters as opposed to the more common computational model. In other words, you don't need a $50,000 computer to do a $5 process... or, don't use and entire brain if a single neuron will do.

It is a concept that is gaining steam and some growing respect from even the traditional 'high-end' robotics groups. When I joined the primary mailing list in 1998, there were less than a hundred people that were even interested in the subject. Today, the list members number into the thousands, and at least 2 other subgroups have started from the main stream.

So how does this BEAM thing tie into the title I chose? One of the hallmarks of the BEAM movement is recycling of technology. The most obvious example is Mark Tilden's famous "Walkman", a walking robot that appears to display intelligent behavior and learning skills, built completely from an old Walkman portable stereo. The mailing list is peppered with nifty tricks about how to reclaim good parts from old VCR's and computers, or where to find the best junk sources for your recycling effort. We have turned "dumpster diving" into a new high-tech art form.

I never thought of myself as an innovation leader, but my sister likes to relate stories of my youth when I had been ordered to reassemble something I had taken apart. WHAT??!! I was just curious. Besides, things always worked again when I put them back together (sometimes better). Perhaps this is why I was drawn to BEAM and robotics in general. I take great pleasure in creating something from nothing, and it is even more rewarding when you can recycle some old dead computer or VCR that was headed for the junk pile, into something that works and may actually be useful.

I often feel a bit like the character Rubin, in Gibson's Winter Market, sifting through the junk looking for the gems that others ignore because they can't tell the difference between salvage scrap and garbage. Then, once you find the piece that you have been searching for, artfully integrating it into the rest of the collection until it can be brought to life. This is tech-art. This is intelli-life.

Gomi no sensei Des - I am master of junk.

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