Each of the team members answered the following questions about the robot:

Do you think the robot is intelligent?

Is the robot conscious?

Does the robot have a mind?

Do you feel any differently regarding the feasibility of AI after completing this project?

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Nicholas Marshall

"Does the robot have and mind and is it conscious: With the amount of difficulty it has provided me as the programmer... Yes. I have to believe it has a mind and consciousness, and that it is using it to make my life more annoying and difficult. It may not be as smart as any of us, or be able to beat a somebody at chess, much less know what chess is, but it does learn about the world relevant to it; The Wumpus World. Given the same scenario, if I was in it, odds are I would forget something, and walk into a hole. Its intelligence is not nearly as versatile as a humans, but it minds just simply focused wholeheartedly on its goal, and it does not need to know more. Simplicity does not mean that it does not have a mind."

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Christina Elmore

"I wouldn't say I consider the robot to be anything more than a neat little program. I don't think it's conscious or has a mind, since we've seen the code that makes it work and it can't do anything other than what that code explicitly states, nor can it even make changes to that code on its own. It may be considered intelligent in the same way that a calculator is, in that it can respond appropriately to input based on its code, but it does not actually understand what is happening. It is not doing logic to solve puzzles, it is just doing what the code says and that happens to lead to puzzles being solved because the logic was worked out in the code. This project did not change my point of view about the feasibility of AI. I don't think programs that just follow their code like our robot does can be considered AI, so doing this project did not make me feel like AI was any more possible than I thought it was when we started."

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Patrick Zhou

"Judging from the performance of the robot, I would say that the robot is intelligent and has certain kind of mind. However, the robot doesn’t seem to have a conscious. According to the definition of intelligent, the process of acquiring sensory input, processing the information and making choices does form some kind of intelligence. Also, if we look at the processes separately, we will find out that the robot actually presents sensory function, memory function and logic function, which are crucial mind functions. Although the robot seems to have mind and intelligence, I still consider it doesn’t have a conscious because a conscious requires a subject to generate concepts about itself and its surroundings. 

 

Even though our robot is hard wired to solve certain kind of logic problem, this project did show me more possibility of future AI development."

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Claire McManus

"I do not think the robot is intelligent but rather it is simply following the code that was inputted. The robot is given commands through the program and can only act within the bounds of the code. I do not think the robot is conscious because it cannot make its own decisions; it merely follows the logic that was constructed into the algorithm. The robot does not have its own mind but rather it knowledge is derived from the knowledge of human minds that created the program. I do not feel any different about the feasibility of AI after this project because I think that AI needs to be much more complex than a simple problem solving robot and there is no way to compare the feasibility of AI after only building a robot. AI would require a much higher level of intelligence and personally I believe that AI would need to be able to 'think' for itself and makes its own decisions without needing input."