Hey,

Now you're thinking cleanly along the lines of the thought experiment
proposed
by Anne.  Memory of past success is one key to reducing the chance of
getting stuck
way down.  If you scan through past experience and see an environment that
fits the "impassable" rules of your capabilities, then go right to the other
tile/path/trial.

Has anyone read Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky?  His theory of memory is
via agents
that have inputs from other agents that have inputs form other agents and
connect up
all in parallel when one big mother agent is happy such that they can be
triggered again whenever the brain thinks of one of those happy outcomes.
"Thinks of"
means in light of short term memory around that past event, and
being one of the saved happy category of memories.  happy memories don't
collapse into
a single state.  They save their uniqueness in time and circumstance by the
thread of connection that can reactivate all the agents that participated at
the time of the event that was
remembered in context of causing a happy outcome.  To see if now matches a
happy or
"worn out trying" outcome, all those states are scanned through long enough
to compare to the states of "now" (including short term memory sequence
history).

Short term memory is key to any success in this kind of trial.

How do you make a set of short term memory agents to characterize
wall/obstacle edge
 following?

Darn if I know...

John Griessen

> -----Original Message-----

> Well, for a 100% success rate, the robot must have sensor to
> determine whether
> it's current direction is going to cause trouble, sensors to
> detect the extent
> of it's environment, and it must have a memory to determine where
> it has failed
> before.
>