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Boden Grey Walter's Grey Walter’s Anticipatory Tortoises Margaret Boden Grey Walter and the Ratio Club The British physiologist William Grey Walter (1910–1977) was an early member of the interdisciplinary Ratio Club. This was a small dining club that met several times a year from 1949 to 1955, with a nostalgic final meeting in 1958, at London’s National Hospital for Neurological Diseases. The founder-secretary was the neurosurgeon John Bates, who had worked (alongside the psychologist Kenneth Craik) on servomechanisms for gun turrets during the war. The club was a pioneering source of ideas in what Norbert Wiener had recently dubbed ‘cybernetics’.1 Indeed, Bates’ archive shows that the letter inviting membership spoke of ‘people who had Wiener’s ideas before Wiener’s book appeared’.2 In fact, its founders had considered calling it the Craik Club, in memory of Craik’s work—not least, his stress on ‘synthetic’ models of psychological theories.3 In short, the club was the nucleus of a thriving British tradition of cybernetics, started independently of the transatlantic version. The Ratio members—about twenty at any given time—were a very carefully chosen group. Several of them had been involved in wartime signals research or intelligence work at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing had used primitive computers to decipher the Nazis’ Enigma code.4 They were drawn from a wide range of disciplines: clinical psychiatry and neurology, physiology, neuroanatomy, mathematics/statistics, physics, astrophysics, and the new areas of control engineering and computer science.5 The aim was to discuss novel ideas: their own, and those of guests—such as Warren McCulloch. Indeed, McCulloch—the prime author, a few years earlier, of what became the seminal paper in cognitive science (McCulloch and Pitts 1943)—was their very first speaker in December 1949. (Bates and Donald MacKay, who’d hatched the idea of the club on a shared train journey after visiting Grey Walter, knew that McCulloch was due to visit England and timed the first meeting accordingly.) Turing himself gave a guest talk on Educating a Digital Computer exactly a year later, and soon became a member. (His other talk to the club was on morphogenesis.) Professors were barred, to protect the openness of speculative discussion. So the imaginative anatomist J. Z. Young (who’d discovered the squid’s giant neurones, and later suggested the ‘selective’ account of learning)6 couldn’t join the club, but gave a talk as a guest. The club’s archives contain a list of thirty possible discussion topics drawn up by Ashby (Owen Holland p.c.). Virtually all of these are still current. What’s more, if one ignores the details, they can’t be better answered now than they could in those days. These wide-ranging meetings were enormously influential, making intellectual waves that are still spreading in various areas of cognitive science. The neurophysiologist Horace Barlow (p.c.) now sees them as crucial for his own intellectual development, in leading him to think about the nervous system in terms of information theory.7 And Giles Brindley, another important neuroscientist,8 who was brought along as a guest by Barlow before joining for a short time, also remembers them as hugely exciting occasions.9 Our specific interest here, however, is in the machines built by one member of the Ratio Club: Grey Walter’s tortoises. These were intended to model general aspects of purpose and learning. Considered as physical objects, they were intriguing gadgets that attracted enormous publicity (frowned on by some Ratio members) in the newspapers. Their theoretical interest, however, was significant. More ‘interest’, perhaps, than immediate influence. With hindsight we can now see how hugely insightful they were. But that 20-20 vision wasn’t available to their contemporaries. Some people got the point, to be sure. The French cybernetician Pierre de Latil (1953), for instance, regarded them as ‘revolutionary’, and wrote about their wider scientific—and philosophical—implications at length. (His book was soon translated into English by a relation of Grey Walter’s boss, the neurologist Frederick Golla.) However, the primitive state of electronic technology didn’t enable those implications to be explored in practice. That wouldn’t be possible until the late 1980s, with the development of behaviour-based (situated) robotics and computational neuroethology.10 Robots at the Festival Grey Walter was the first Director of Physiology (from 1939) at Golla’s newly-founded Burden Neurological Institute, Bristol. He was a highly influential electro-encephalographer. For instance, he discovered the delta and theta rhythms, and designed several pioneering EEG-measuring instruments. In addition, he founded the EEG Society (in 1943), organized the first EEG Congress (1947), and started the EEG Journal (also 1947). With his EEG expert’s hat on, he focussed on the overall effects of large populations of neurones rather than on specific cell connections. But his robots, as we’ll see, used as few ‘neurones’ as possible. His interest in the EEG dated from his time at Cambridge in the early 1930s, when he worked on muscle contraction with Edgar D. Adrian. Ever since the first paper on EEG (by Hans Berger) in 1929, Adrian was a key pioneer in the field. He discovered body mappings (of the limbs, for instance) in both cerebellar and cerebral cortex. And he predicted that improved brain-monitoring technologies would one day—fifty years later, as it turned out11—enable neuroscientists to study the cerebral changes associated with thinking.12 In his youth, Grey Walter also studied conditioning with a team of Ivan Pavlov’s students visiting from St. Petersburg. Indeed, he met Pavlov briefly. But his prime neurological interest was in the activity of the brain as a whole. Besides these psycho-physiological skills, he was a skilled speaker and writer in several languages. He was much in demand to talk on both professional and political issues. Initially a communist, he later veered towards anarchism: that is, the rejection of top-down control. But he was so full of ideas that, as his son Nicolas remembers, ‘he found it difficult to produce more sustained work, and both of his two books were actually written by his father from his notes and conversations’.13 From 1949 onwards, Grey Walter built several intriguing cybernetic machines. These were intended to throw light on the behaviour of biological organisms—although he did point out that they could be adapted for use as ‘a better “self-directing missile”’.14 Unlike actual missiles, however, his machines displayed a range of different behaviours. He’d been inspired, in part, by a wartime conversation with Craik. Craik was then working on scanning and gun aiming, and visited Grey Walter at the Burden Institute to use some of his state-of-the-art electronic equipment. During his visit he suggested that the EEG might be a cortical scanner, affected by sensory stimuli. This idea became influential in neuroscientific circles.15 And it was later modelled by Grey Walter as a rotating photoelectric cell, whose ‘scanning’ stopped when its robot carrier locked onto a light source. Wiener’s influence on him was less effective. Thus in a letter to Adrian written in June 1947 (after Craik’s early death), Grey Walter said: We had a visit yesterday from a Professor Wiener, from Boston. I met him over there last winter and found his views somewhat difficult to absorb, but he represents quite a large group in the States… These people are thinking on very much the same lines as Kenneth Craik did, but with much less sparkle and humour.16 Wiener himself was more generous—or perhaps just more polite. In a letter thanking Grey Walter for his hospitality during this brief visit, he wrote ‘I got a great deal out of our trip, and am certain that it will be possible to renew our contact at some future date’.17 In particular, Grey Walter sought to model goal seeking and, later, learning. But he did so as economically as he could—in both the financial and the theoretical sense. Not only did he want to save money (the creatures were cobbled together from war-surplus items and bits of old alarm clocks), but he was determined to wield Occam’s razor. That is, he aimed to posit as simple a mechanism as possible to explain apparently complex behaviour. And simple, here, meant simple. His wheeled robots, or ‘tortoises’, had two valves, two relays, two motors, two condensers, and one sensor (for light or for touch). In effect, then, a Grey Walter tortoise had only two neurones. For, crucially, the tortoises weren’t mere toys but models of (very simple) nervous systems. Robot toys with simple tropisms were already common at the time, at public exhibitions if not in the toyshops. For instance, a French-made ‘Philidog’ at the 1929 International Radio Exhibition in Paris would follow the light from an electric torch—until it was brought too near to its nose, when it started to bark.18 Ten years later, visitors to the New York World Fair in 1939 were sadly robbed of their chance to be enchanted by another robot dog. It had committed suicide a few days earlier: [The ‘electrical dog’] was to be sensitive to heat and was to have attacked visitors and bitten their calves, but just before the opening of the exhibition it died, the victim of its own sensitivity. Through an open door it perceived the lights of a passing car and rushed headlong towards it and was run over, despite the efforts of the driver to avoid it.19 Great fun—except perhaps for the dog! But nothing to do with neuroscience.
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