APPENDIX ■ ■ ■ Interview with Mark Tilden (Photo courtesy of WowWee Ltd.) WowWee courtesy of (Photo Figure A-1. Here’s Mark Tilden at the 2005 New York Toy Fair. I have used excerpts from this interview throughout the book where applicable, but I also wanted to print it in its entirety. Some things, like Mark’s wonderful commentary on Hong Kong cuisine and his off-the-cuff comments on everything and anything, just didn’t fit into the structure of The Robosapien Companion, but they will be of interest to anyone who is curious about or admires the man behind the robots. 291 292 APPENDIX ■ INTERVIEW WITH MARK TILDEN This interview was conducted on February 13, 2005, at Wolfgang’s Steakhouse in the Murray Hill neighborhood of midtown Manhattan, in New York City. I recorded it with an Olympus DM-10 voice recorder. The dining room at Wolfgang’s is known for its historic tiled ceilings designed by Raphael Guastavino. They are beautiful, but they are an acoustic night- mare! Fortunately, my trusty DM-10 was up to the task. I have edited this only very lightly, mainly breaks where we spoke to waiters and so on. Also note that during a portion of this interview, Mark is showing me a slideshow on a little portable LCD screen. Most of the pictures from the slideshow ended up in Chapter 3. But if during the interview he seems to be making a reference, chances are it is to something on the screen. Without further ado, here is the full text of the interview. ■ ■ ■ SAMANS: Tell me about your work at Los Alamos… TILDEN: When I went to Los Alamos National Labs, basically I was brought in literally under the genius clause, which is kind of nice. I didn’t have a PhD at the time. So what happened is that I get down there and I basically say two things: I don’t have the credentials, so I could have said “Hi, you have to believe me.” <Laughs> So I promised that I would only ever say things if I had something that actually worked. Boy did that do me both good and bad. Good: I was able to build things successfully that are now still working in museums and various places across the country. Bad, because there are an awful lot of people, primarily roboticists, who have their entire reputation based entirely upon virtual presence. “Oh one day the robots will basically take over. Do you have any evidence? Well no, but my toaster is hostile!” SAMANS: Two quotes of yours really stood out to me. One, you said they have all these great robots that work great in the computers and they are all based on sort of virtual, weightless rope... TILDEN: That was a beautiful detail of my original history in America. I worked for approxi- mately 30 agencies (DARPA, NASA, etc.) and there’s a great book called Virtual—something like Virtual Minds or something like that—which has a beautiful chronology. Basically what happened when I moved down to New Mexico, I was thinking that I would be able to get in tight with the artificial life guys. Because obviously that’s what I was doing: I was building self- evolving mechanisms that are capable of doing real work in the real world. But I wasn’t playing by their rules. That’s just it. As soon as you start measuring against their stuff, they suddenly realized: “OK, well, we can’t support you, because unfortunately you are invalidating all of our theory.” SAMANS: Which brings me to the second funny quote I remembered.You described a robot you built out of like three broken Walkmans, that beat a robot at a sumo competition that some- one had spent something like 10 years working on. TILDEN: The stories just went on. They would show up, and there would be the MIT team: 20 kids and one robot. And then there was the JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratories, the leading U.S. center for robotic exploration of the solar system ] team, and there was oh, University of APPENDIX ■ INTERVIEW WITH MARK TILDEN 293 Wisconsin, Washington, Delaware, Carnegie Mellon, and there is uh, Los Alamos National labs—hi! For example, there was a big thing JPL put on back in 1998. We were at this major JPL con- ference, and it was exactly like that. Everyone else shows up with like 20 people and one robot. I always showed up with one roboticist and 20 robots. Literally I would come out with this nonstop flea circus. Some of these things people still remember: “I remember when you put a robot on an overhead projector and it kept moving the entire time when you were talking and you never had to worry about it falling off!” Yeah, of course! Doesn’t your robot work com- pletely autonomously and independently regardless of whether or not you are around to look at it? No? SAMANS: <Laughing> Right, they start looking to all their buddies on their team… TILDEN: <Laughing> That’s right, how many grad students do YOU have working on your machine? One of the things I talked about earlier on in my career: Wizard of Oz demonstrations. Stand back, don’t touch, and pay no attention to that cable leading behind the curtain. I am the great powerful roboticist of Oz. And there are an awful lot of great and powerful roboticists of Oz. Asimo, for example. You never see the whole picture, you see only the robot. You don’t see the guy over in the corner who is getting paid $23,000 a day. Asimo also comes with two guys who look after it, and I actually saw this happen in Tokyo. When Asimo starts to fall over, it is their job to throw themselves under the robot, because you’ve got $15 million worth of robot hitting the ground. So it’s gonna be either squishy Japanese people, or a broken robot toy. I can tell you one of the things I learned from the toy industry is that you can’t sell broken toys. SAMANS: Which is one of the coolest things about the Robosapien.You can really put that thing through the paces. TILDEN: Like you wouldn’t believe. It’s one of its hidden features that it actually has the ability... I mean you can kick the crap out of that thing, it can take a tumble down the stairs. The fifth major sell feature was this: for a seven-motor toy we have had less than a 0.03 percent return rate. That means one in every 340 robots sold actually had some sort of mechanical defect. SAMANS: Excellent. TILDEN: That’s astonishing! In [the] toy industry, normally there is always a 3 percent [return rate]—every standard radio-controlled toy that you see sold has an average of 3 percent to 50 percent return. Furby was a 33 percent return. You’ve got to remember, any toy that is returned, you have to sell two toys to recover the costs. Because a toy that is returned is not refunded from the money from the retailer, it is refunded by the money from the actual distributor—that is the person who actually owns the toy. The retailer just basically leases us the space to move our product. We own it. So the Robosapien was a big risk this year. And the reason that Hasbro got rid of [WowWee, formerly owned by Hasbro] was because of the Robosapien. Because they’d seen the problem that they’d had just with the Furby, with one motor, and this thing has seven? And you expect it’s going to be reliable? We’ve got some statistics for you... 294 APPENDIX ■ INTERVIEW WITH MARK TILDEN The thing was, that they didn’t know, they’d only ever seen conventional robots go out. The Robosapien is, and it’s really cool to look at the awards—and we just got our stats and data in and it’s fantastic. ■ ■ ■ TILDEN: Unfortunately, living in Hong Kong has taught me to basically be very scared. They eat things that you don’t even see on the Discovery Channel. There are some fish that are obvi- ously a lot happier at the bottom of the ocean. I’m talking about some pretty ugly-looking things. The thing is, they don’t eat the part you’d think they would. I was actually in Japan when they served me the head of a 600-pound tuna. So we’re talking about an eye the same size of one of these buns here. And you’re basically saying “Oh, wow, that’s... wonderful!” Because you know it’s some sort of honor, but I’m sorry, I just don’t know what part of the fish head to eat! You’re supposed to eat the cheeks, suck the retinas—thank you—I mean these are the sort of things they don’t put in the tour guides. Some sushi I like in China, but again you have to watch out what you are eating. You get a little bit of rice, and all of a sudden there’s this octopus tentacle right on top of it, and it’s a foot long! You can see the suckers. All I can think of, if I stuck a battery in it, would it come to life? The temptation is very high to give it a try. There are a couple restaurants in Hong Kong, what they do is they bring you out steamed fish, they bring you out this thing and there’s the head.