a history of cybernetic animals and early robots
Johan de Boer's description (from private correspondence 2010) "A second project [ RH: to the Cybernetic Mouse] was the maze where a light was used to indicate the position of an imaginary mouse in the maze. The maze could be changed with small removable barriers. Each square had a small light bulb that would be …
Oakland Tribune 22 Aug 1957 Lauren V. Merritt, 17, son of Mr. and Mrs. L.C. Merritt of El Cerrito, was concerned. "Gizzmo is acting up," he said. "Gizzmo" is a maze-solving robot. Push a button anywhere and a light bounces through a ?complicated maze? and "Gizzmo" remembers the way out. Merritt is a student of …
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Robert J. Curran's Mechanical Maze is included here as it is essentially a mechanical computer, exhibiting similar characteristics as other electro-mechanical maze solvers. As the mouse travels a path, if it has to back out due to a dead-end, the return pass triggers a mechanical latch to give the maze a "memory". The patent description gives …
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pdf – Popular Electronics October 1962 Bionics Bionic "Mouse." As mentioned earlier, RCA is working on a far more complicated moving-target indicator containing hundreds of neurons which operates on the same principle. But perhaps the most important piece of neural-bionic hardware to come out of the laboratories so far is a "bionic mouse" built by the …
In 1952, Richard A. Wallace built a Maze Solving Computer as a model of "machine learning". His definition of learning is "The ability to modify a response to a stimulus because of past experience with the stimulus." see full pdf here.