William Grey Walter

William Grey Walter ( born February 19, 1910 in Kansas City, Missouri; † May 6, 1977 ) was an American neurophysiologist and robotics researchers.

Overview

Walter was born in 1910 in Kansas City, Missouri. His parents German / British were originally paternal and American / British mother. In 1915 they sent him to England to school. He was taught first at Westminster School and then to 1931 at King 's College, Cambridge. Since he was not a research fellowship at Cambridge, he turned from 1935 to 1939 the basic and applied neurophysiological research in hospitals in London. From 1939 to 1970 he worked at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol. He took over research in the United States, the Soviet Union and in various other places in Europe. He was married twice and had two sons from his first and a son from his second wife. According to his eldest son, Nicolas Walter, he was " politically leftist, a communist fellow traveler before the Second World War and a sympathetic anarchist then. " During his life he was considered a pioneer in the field of cybernetics. In 1970 he was involved in a serious car accident and died seven years later, on May 6, 1977 without having fully recovered.

Brain waves

As a young man Walter was heavily influenced by the works of the famous Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. He visited the laboratory of Hans Berger, of the electroencephalograph, or electroencephalography, invented. With it, the electrical activity of the human brain was measured. Walter Berger developed machine on; with his version, he discovered a number of different brainwave patterns. They ranged from the fast alpha waves to the slow delta waves, which he observed during the sleep phase.

In the thirties Walter get a series of discoveries with his EEG equipment at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol. He was the first to found by surveying the origin of alpha waves in the occipital lobe properly. He demonstrated how you could use delta waves to find tumors or wounds, which were responsible for epilepsy. He developed the first brain - topographer, which was based on electroencephalography and for which he used spirally arranged cathode ray tubes, which were connected with highly sensitive amplifiers.

During the Second World War, he worked on radar, sensing technology and remote-controlled missiles, which may have influenced his subsequent theory of the representation of the brain activity by alpha waves.

In the sixties Walter discovered the EKP - component " contingent negative variation " (CNV ). This corresponds to the negativity in the EEG of a person after a first stimulus, which points to a second task- relevant stimulus.

Robotics

Walter was known by the construction of the first autonomous robot. He wanted to prove that many connections between a small number of neurons can give rise to a complex behavior - in particular, find the secret of how the brain works and how it is wired. His first robot he used as " Machina Speculatrix " to call, calling them " Elmer " and " Elsie ". These robots he built 1948-1949; they were often described because of their appearance and their slow movements as " turtles " - and because they taught the science about the secrets of organization and life. The three-wheeled tortoise robots were capable of phototaxis; they could find their way to a charging station when its batteries ran out.

In one of his experiments, he placed a light on the "nose" of a turtle and watched as observed in a mirror, the robot itself. "It started to flicker ," he wrote, " quickly back and forth shaking and jumping like a clumsy Narcissus in the Wind". If this had been seen in an animal, Walter argued, it "might be accepted as an expression of a degree of self-knowledge. "

Later versions of the robots were exhibited at the 1951 Festival of Britain. Walter emphasized the importance of fully analogue electronics to simulate brain processes, while his contemporaries, such as Alan Turing and John von Neumann, their implementation of intelligent processes looked more in the areas of digital predictability. Walter inspired subsequent robotics researchers such as Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec and Mark Tilden. Modern versions of Walters " turtles " can be found today in the form of BEAM robots.

1995 one of the original turtles by Dr. Owen Holland was rebuilt at the University of West England - where some of the original parts have been used. A copy of the second generation of the turtle is on display at the Smithsonian.

Works

  • The Living Brain. Penguin, London 1967.
  • An imitation of life. In: Scientific American. 182, No. 5, 1950, pp. 42-45.
  • A machine did learns. In: Scientific American. 185, No. 2, 1951, pp. 60-63.
  • Contingent negative variation: An electrical sign of sensorimotor association and expectancy in the human brain. In: Nature. 203, 1964, pp. 380-384.
  • Physiologist
  • Americans
  • Born 1910
  • Died in 1977
  • Man
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