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This version of the CMU report on Quasar is not for distribution.
Some people thought it might be too harsh.
∂17-Nov-77  1019	FTP:BRIAN REID(C410BR10) at CMU-10A  	Long version of the robot story (not for public release) 
Date:    17 Nov 1977 1317-EST
Sender:  BRIAN.REID at CMU-10A
Subject: Long version of the robot story (not for public release)
From:    BRIAN REID(C410BR10) at CMU-10A 
To:      JMC at SU-AI

- - - -
     The Carnegie-Mellon University Computer Science Department
                               meets 
                    `The Ultimate Home Appliance'

                (Reported by Mark Fox and Brian Reid)

 On October  24, 1977, a well-known department store  in the heart of
Pittsburgh advertised the  appearance of a so-called `domestic robot'
named Sam Strugglegear.  Although this `robot' is not yet offered for
sale, its  builder,  Anthony Reichelt  of  Quasar Industries  in  New
Jersey,  claims that  its powers  include speech  recognition (with a
4800-word  vocabulary), sonar-navigated steering, and  the ability to
do  household  chores  such as  vacuuming,  serving  of  drinks,  and
babysitting.   This highly-publicized  `robot' has  been described in
Newsweek, Parade, and other national magazines, and has been on tour,
appearing at department stores around the country.

 Knowing  of  CMU's   pioneering  work  in  Artificial  Intelligence,
particularly in  the  field of  speech recognition,  various  people,
taken in by all the publicity,  have called CMU to ask how this robot
might be  so much better at speech recognition  than our talented and
dedicated research team.

 Rising to  the challenge, four courageous  members of our department
went downtown to investigate.  They found a frightening sight: in the
men's department,  among the three-piece suits, was  a 5'2'' image of
an aerosol  can on  wheels,  talking animatedly  to the  crowd.   The
`robot' seemed  able to  converse on  any subject,  to recognize  the
physical  features of  the  customers,  and to  move  freely  (though
slowly) in  any direction.  While the crowd was  quite charmed by the
seeming talents of the machine, we  knew it had to be a fake, and set
out to find just what kind.

 The  `robot' moved on  a set of  wheels; there were  two large drive
wheels  about ten inches  in diameter, and  several small stabilizing
wheels:  a mechanism quite similar to the MIT turtle.  It moved about
three inches  per second, approximately one  tenth the normal walking
speed of an  adult.  We saw both arms rotate  at the shoulder along a
horizontal axis.   Although there was a joint at  the elbow, we never
saw it move (perhaps this model had no actuator in the elbow).

 The hands  were like clam-shells in design.  There  was a rod at the
wrist  that could be used  for opening and closing  the hands, but on
the  model we saw, the  hands were actually glued  shut, so that they
could not move even if there were an actuator.  The actuators for the
arms were  electric motors attached to the arms  by gears rather than
belts.  When an arm was blocked while in motion, the motor would stop
dead, indicating the presence of some feedback mechanism, but one not
as sophisticated as those  found on laboratory robot arms, capable of
sensing an object without  stopping dead in its presence.  One patron
asked to see the robot vacuum  a carpet, but was brushed off with the
reply that its batteries were running low.

 The  CMU team  next  set  out  to investigate  the  robot's  sensory
mechanisms.  Other  than  the arm  stopping  when it  encountered  an
object, it didn't seem to  have any!  Pushing and blocking its motion
had no effect; the motors kept spinning away.  It didn't seem able to
tell that an object was blocking its path.  When a foot was placed in
its  path as  it was  moving, it kept  moving against  the foot, with
enough  force to injure  had the block  been an infant  instead of an
adult  foot.  Covering the  faceplate did not change  its behavior at
all.  Since the robot seemed able to navigate around the room without
hitting anything, and since it didn't have any sensory perception, we
knew  that somebody in  the room  had to be  secretly controlling the
robot, most likely by radio.

 We began looking around the room for evidence of remote control.  Lo
and behold, about ten feet  from the robot, standing in the crowd, we
found a man in a blue  suit with his hand held contemplatively to his
mouth  like Aristotle contemplating  the bust of Homer  in the famous
Rembrandt painting.   After watching  for a  while, we  noticed  that
whenever  the robot was  talking, the man  in the blue  suit could be
seen  muttering into his  hand.  Further  seeing that this  man had a
wire dangling suspiciously from his waist to his shoe, one of the CMU
group  screwed up  his  courage  and approached  this  stranger.   We
introduced ourselves as members of CMU's Computer Science Department.
"Do many people figure out  what you are doing?", we asked.  "No," he
said,  "they are usually too  busy watching the robot  to notice me."
"Aha!",  we thought to  ourselves, "it  looks like we're  on to their
hoax."

 We then asked him what were the robot's speech and vision abilities,
to which he replied that the machine can see about ten inches, dimly,
and that  its speech-understanding  ability was  about 200  words  of
unconnected speech in a quiet environment.  We wondered aloud why the
man with  the microphone was necessary if the  robot had actually had
the  ability to recognize  speech, but  he didn't want  to talk about
that.  One  of the reasons that  he didn't want to  talk about it was
that while he was talking to us, the robot had to remain mute, and if
it  remained mute  too long,  more people  might figure  out what was
happening.

 We didn't really believe his statement of the robot's abilities, and
in the  light  of  our discoveries  of  the robot's  poor  perceptive
skills, we  were convinced  that  there must  be yet  another  remote
control  handling the motion.   Time was running out;  they needed to
move  the machine to  a suburban store for  an evening demonstration.
We returned to CMU feeling unsatisfied.

 When we gave our report to the rest of the lab back at CMU, a second
group of eight immediately  set out to the suburban store, determined
to find  and expose the source of the  robot's control.  They found a
furtive-looking and rather  disagreeable person loitering in the back
of  the room.  He was  carrying an airline flight  bag, with his hand
stuck  down inside the bag.   We asked him his  business, to which he
replied  that he  was a truck  driver.  He  became extremely agitated
when we asked him what was  in the bag, asking if we were police.  We
dispatched a person to watch  him, in an attempt to find correlations
between movements  of his hand and movements  of the robot, whereupon
he  got very excited  and called for  store officials to  come get us
away from him.  We never did  get to see in the bag.  However, we did
see the man with the microphone say to a store official, "Tell him we
want  to take it for  a walk," whereupon the  store official wandered
over to the `bag man' and whispered to him, "They want to take it for
a walk." A few seconds later,  the eyes of the `bag man' fixed on the
robot, it started ambling slowly down the corridor.

 It would be tempting to call this robot a total fake, but it is not.
It is only a partial fake.  It is a fake robot, but a reasonably good
parlor trick,  more  in  the domain  of  magicians than  of  computer
scientists.   It is interesting to  muse about just why  this hoax is
being perpetrated.  Are they setting up some kind of a stock-exchange
fraud?  Are they making  all of their money from the department-store
visits, with no intention of ever building the real robot?  Only time
will tell.

 One is  reminded of how much better were  the parlor tricks of olden
days -- for example,  the chess-playing robot built by Baron Wolfgang
von Kempelen in 1769.  Spectators  were given a view of the inside of
the robot, satisfying themselves that it could not possibly contain a
person.   The robot would then  trounce them at chess,  all the while
rolling its  eyes and nodding its head.  The  workings of this famous
`Turk' were  not revealed until 1848, more than  70 years later, when
it  was bought  by  the  Philadelphia Chess  Club  and  disassembled.
Thousands  of people, including  Napoleon and Edgar  Allan Poe, tried
unsuccessfully to  figure out how it worked; very  rarely was it even
beaten.

 Kempelen's description of his own robot, circa 1771, is probably the
best  summary of  Sam Strugglegear:   "A mere  bagatelle, not without
merit in point of  mechanism, but whose effects appear marvelous only
from the  boldness of  conception and  the clever  choice of  methods
adopted for promoting the illusion."

-------
Thanks for the copy of your original version.  I'll keep it out of
the newspapers.  It didn't lose a lot
by being toned down, but I think Minsky is right that it is the
responsibility of scientists in a field to expose frauds in their
area.  This may require incurring some risk of being sued, since these
days, an over population of lawyers encourages groundless suits.