Flight Evolution and Robots
The hands at the Darwin Ranch are all a-twitter because of a robot bird that has been developed. Not so much the robot bird itself since that has been done before, but making a version of Caudipteryx , a disputed "dinosaur with feathers". Yee ha boy howdy, it flapped its robot wings when it ran. Caudipteryx Hendrickx , Wikimedia Commons / Christophe Hendrickx ( CC by-SA 3.0 ) There's a wagon train-load of assumptions (and wishful thinking) happening. First, researchers assume that dinosaurs evolved into birds. Second, they assumed evolution itself is not a myth. Third, the way it moved was assumed. Fourth, since all we have are fossils, many assumptions were made about its appearance. Using these and other assumptions, they made a robot that flapped when it ran. Of course. Any programming, including artificial intelligence , begins with the input given by the programmers. Like evidence, if you torture programming enough, it will confess to anything. What kind