Groups with Minds of Their Own Making

Minds of their own.

L ike a miniature Segway with eyes, a robot built from 3D printed plastic does laps around a cubicle here at Brain Corporation, having learned in a matter of minutes to avoid bumping into walls as it roams. As eyeRover scoots away, Peter O'Connor, a staff scientist at the robotics software company, steps into its route. Using a remote control unit, he briefly takes control of the foot-tall robo...

Do dolphins know their own minds?

Knowledge of one’s own states of mind is one of the varieties of self-knowledge. Do any nonhuman animals have the capacity for this variety of self-knowledge? The question is open to empirical inquiry, which is most often conducted with primate subjects. Research with a bottlenose dolphin gives some evidence for the capacity in a nonprimate taxon. I describe the research and evaluate the metaco...

The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?

The illusion of independent agency (IIA) occurs when a fictional character is experienced by the person who created it as having independent thoughts, words, andlor actions. Children often report this sort of independence in their descriptions of imaginary companions. This study investigated the extent that adult writers experience IIA with the characters they create for their works of fiction....

Individual Minds as Groups, Group Minds as Individuals

Making Our Own Luck

QuickCheck-style property-based random testing [4] requires efficient generators for well-distributed random data satisfying complex logical predicates. Writing such generators by hand can be difficult and error prone. We propose a domain-specific language, Luck, in which generators are expressed by decorating predicates with lightweight annotations controlling both the distribution of generate...