On 07/06/2011 04:28 PM, Aydan wrote:

> Walking
> across a room is not a precalculated series of movements like it would be for
> most robots.

...which is why the robot is wrong. The *correct* way to navigate 
unknown terrain is to constantly monitor and adapt to your surroundings.

> Whenever anything happens that's not quite as it was "planned" it will just
> change the movement slightly without your conciousness even noticing.

Yes. And these changes are very, very precise. If they weren't, you'd 
fall over. The fact that it does this in a feedback loop doesn't negate 
the need for very exact, very fine controls.

> Facial recognition is much the same. The human brain has dedicated structures
> for exactly that purpose. If they are damaged, the person suddenly can't
> recognize faces anymore.

Like I said: The human brain is an elaborate special-purpose 
computational device which is ridiculously good at the things it's 
designed for, and drastically less good at the things it isn't designed for.

> And about accuracy of facial recognition:
> How sure you are about recognizing someone depends largely on how well you know
> that person and if there's other persons you know that look alike.

People have actually done research on this. The vast majority of people 
recognise other people with stunning accuracy. Not that they /think/ 
they do, but that you can actually /measure/ this.

That said, it's also been found that people from a different ethnic 
group tend to look more uniform to you than they do to people belonging 
to that ethnic group. Whether this is a genetic or environmental thing 
is a subject of some debate. (Although it seems quite reasonable to me 
that it's simply a calibration issue.)

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