I’m working on a Lego Robot, using a Handyboard, for my AI class. It’s a lot of fun. My brothers had told me about the robot project they worked on their first year at OSU, but I had no idea how much fun it was. The current assignment is to get the robot to drive around on top of a table, looking for a light source, and avoiding falling off of the edge. In order to avoid having the robot get stuck in a corner, I implemented what can best be described as ‘boredom.’ Every time the robot decides to perform an action, if it’s a ‘boring’ action, the robot’s boredom counter is incremented. Other actions are ‘exciting’, causing the robot to decrement its boredom counter. The counter itself gradually ticks down over time. If it ever gets too high, the robot just stops whatever it was doing and does a complete about face, hoping to find something more exciting to do. Without the ‘boredom’ mechanism, the robot can get stuck in some kind of rut.
I had the idea several years ago that perhaps ‘boredom’ was essential to our survival as a species. Whenever I get bored, I go look for something to do. Sometimes, that leads me to something productive. If we human beings didn’t get bored, we might become content just to have enough resources to get by. My guess is that lots of important ideas were discovered by people who could easily afford to amuse themselves doing whatever, but would just get terribly bored.
My whole life has been a struggle to avoid being bored. I get bored very easily and don’t deal with it well. It’s interesting that a feeling that causes me such frustration could be essential to the survival of the species. I suppose that wouldn’t be the first time, though…
I gave a presentation on my comptuer science research today, and this crazy old guy came up and asked what this research was going to do to solve the humanitarian problems in the world. I told him that wasn’t the focus of my research, and we got into an argument about whether or not the Humanities were infinitely superior to the Sciences. That’s a topic for another post, however.