robotics on f21

[jfox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jeff Fox)]

Dear MISC readers,

I have been thinking about the Rochester Forth conference
that I attended after my first year at iTV.

I well remember the robotics meeting at the conference. I
often think of the plug and play robotic hot insertion
open robotforth standard suggested.  I loved the idea.
It should be the machine forth model of course not
the openboot tokenized or for God's sake no ANSI.

I love the idea that you just pull off the head or arm
or put a new on while things are running at it all
talks to the other things and pass what they can do
to other stuff when you snap them in, it reconfigures
itself and starts using the new arm.

Robotis and AI were the original real targets.  I have
not really promoted the chip until today.  I have
really explained that yes we will replace your 8051
but on your chip you do minimul reconfiguration and
the interface between your clunky CPU and your clumbsy
I/O subsystems are running at tens of kilohertz.

On my chips folks there are four programmable I/O subsystems 
that are somewhat reconfigurable processors where you 
have the ability to program circuits running at 10 gigahertz.
Yes that is the speed on the inside of the A/D D/A
ramps and even of the echo timer.  It is right there
in the specs but Chuck advised me not to try to
explain it to people until I got working silicon.

programable analog I/O from the two different analog I/O subsystems 
one for low res video up to VGA with genlock and the other 
for everything else from 800x600x24 or HDTV.  14 parallel
I/O lines for general purpose use or network interconnect
with infinite architectural variations and a programmable
network/active message passing DMA and remote interrupt
gigahertz I/O coprocessor and of course our CPU, and
of course lots of stuff that no one understands yet.

And of couse smp with nodes that can be snapped together
like lego blocks but with power and I/O interconnect
and I/O connectors on every block.  I want a more powerful
lego robot than the one on the market.

People don't seem to make the jump from things like
the functions implemented in the simple video coprocessor
really make it a Chuck Moore clever windows accelerator.
I don't just want my GUI 1000x smaller than yours that
already makes it 1000x faster, I want another 1000x
from my clever programmable windows accelerator. People
have no idea.

The match between executeable decision trees and our
stack machines is perfect.  The mapping of complex expert
systems expressed in Enlish, sets of rules of fuzzy logic,
and trainable neural nets to those executable decision
trees using Forth is almost trivial. We have removed so
many layers of fat that a comparison to what other
people are doing has more than ten zeros.

I want to test several crackpot ideas in AI that I think
can give me about six more zeros concerning Robot smarts.
With this stuff I honestly believe that this thing is
so much smart than people realize that it is truely
frightening.  And almost nothing scares me.  I used to
say nothing.

Jeff Fox