The Stupid Robot 

In the 1960s, I was a young electronics engineer designing guided missile simulators. In the late 1970s, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, of which I had become a member, started a competition for engineers who were interested in robotics and the new field of artificial intelligence to see who could produce a robot mouse that would be able to find its way through a wooden maze in the fastest time. The original competition specified that the robot mouse had to find its way out of a 10ft x 10ft maze and was held in New York. You can read about the history of the competition here. 

That competition, originally known as the Amazing Micromouse Competition, is still going on and has spawned many clones all over the world. As you can imagine, the robot mice of the 1970’s were rather stupid. This was before the spread of the personal computer, which only started to become available around 1975 and were still large and heavy. I know because I owned one in the late 1970s and used to lug its 24kg around with me from office to home. A robot mouse that could be entered in the competition could only be tiny in comparison – about 16cm x 16cm. 

What interests me is that what the micromouse has to do moment by moment to find its way through the maze seems to me to be strangely similar to what we humans do to navigate our way through life, moment by moment. Because we live in the present and cannot access the future until it happens, one of our main tasks is to decide at every moment which way will lead us in the right direction – I don’t mean only in a physical sense. Every decision we make at every moment leads to and affects the next moment. All religions give us codes of behaviour that will hopefully help us to make the right decision here and now – how to make the "right" decision and not the "wrong" decision; how to make a "good" decision and not a "bad" decision. And so it is with the micromouse. In early versions, engineers tried to design a mouse that would “feel” its way through the maze with arms that touched the sides of the maze. 

Modern Micromouse

Modern micromice use all kinds of sensors to enable the mouse to “see” where it should go next. Engineers have developed micromice that have memory so that they can “remember” the best route to take and avoid making mistakes. Memory is also used to enable the mouse to predict what is coming next based on past experiences, an activity known as “learning”, and the mouse is allowed a trial run so that it can learn about the maze. So the mouse moves forward, at every moment processing the inputs from the sensors arranged round its body and comparing with the information in its memory. The more information the mouse has from its surroundings and the better its memory, the better it should behave, measured by the time it takes to get to its goal at the centre of the maze. A fast mouse is able to integrate all the information made available to it and instantaneously make the best decision on which way to go at every moment. The mouse in this video seems to know exactly where it is going. 

And do we humans know where we are going? How do we decide which way to go? Or what to do? Or how to behave? Decision-making forms one of our most fundamental tasks, because it is the memory of all our present actions that, strung together, form the story that constitutes what we call our “life”. And it would seem that if we want to lead a “good” life, we need to keep making good decisions. And if we keep making “bad” decisions, we will end up leading a bad life. 

In most “developed” countries, we are taught that the best way to make a "good" decision is by thinking about it. The maxim “think before you act” sums this up well. It advises us to look deeply at what we intend to do and think over how we should do it before we begin to act. It also implicitly warns us that if we do not do so, we will not act “right” and problems may follow. This emphasis on thinking is one of the reasons for the excellent progress made by western civilisation. At the same time, it is the root cause of many of our problems. 

Returning to the micromouse for a minute, a successful micromouse does not only use its ability to "think"; it must integrate all the abilities that the designer has given it – memory, processing power, inputs from sensors and motional dexterity – to make an instant decision and to act as a whole. On the other hand, we are taught to stop, think and then act. We are not encouraged to take into account any other inputs to our system. No one will encourage you to listen to your body, to be aware of your stomach or any tensions in your neck when deciding. Over the course of time, we have come to believe that the body and the mind are separate, that the mind thinks and the body acts. That the best way to act is to get the mind right and then use our mind to get the body to act right. 

This belief is not always helpful, and often limits our ability to live simple and harmonious lives. But although this is what we are taught to believe, it is often not how we actually live. In fact, we are more like the micromouse than we know. In reality, we do to some extent listen to our body and our mind and all other inputs when making a decision. But because we are taught that we should think about our decision, we give priority to what we think, and don’t fully trust these other inputs. Our action is biased – our belief in the maxim “think before you act” changes or biases the way we act. 

Just as the micromouse engineer tunes his little mouse to use all the inputs available to make the right instantaneous decision, so can we. But to do so, we need to learn how to correct the bias towards thinking that our civilisation has imprinted on us. How to describe that? My dear friend John Fraser uses the term “embodiment” to describe the state where we “put the body-and-mind back together” and I like that a lot, so I will use it here. If we let ourselves be embodied – that is, without the bias towards thinking before acting – then we act as a whole being. This is the state studied and written about by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his seminal work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and by Timothy Gallwey in his book The Inner Game of Tennis, and several others. It is often described as “being in the zone” and it is the state that forms the basis of the martial arts. 

Dogen describes this embodiment as the buddhist state experienced in zazen and talks about it many times in the Shobogenzo. He talks about the state where we are not embodied with the phrase "tainted". He says that our actions are tainted (ZENNA, 汚染) when we are not embodied.  I will look at some of these phrases next time.