THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL INVENTORS OF ALL TIME

7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

had become discouraged with AI research, especially with
the field’s top-down approach to problem solving. The
top-down approach, which dominated the field at that
time, presupposes that a computer must first be supplied
with an internal representation of the “essential” features
of the world in which it operates—an immensely difficult
framework problem for all but the very simplest tasks.
Brooks turned this approach on its head, arguing that
research should focus on a bottom-up approach—that is,
on action and behaviour rather than on representation
and function. Brooks began by building basic robots that
could perform the simplest “insect-like” actions. Although
no one claims that insects have sophisticated brains, they
can engage in rather elaborate behaviours. Similarly,
building on a few simple actions and the premise that
learning comes from interacting with the real world rather
than any model, Brooks’s robots displayed surprisingly
complex behaviour.
In 1997 Brooks became director of the MIT Artificial
Intelligence Research Laboratory, where he continued
to push AI in this fundamentally new direction. His
influential and accessible essays were collected in
Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI (1999).
What initially had appeared heretical to traditional AI
eventually became a new orthodoxy, complete with
industrial and military applications. Brooks and his stu-
dents designed robots to explore Mars, as well as for
more mundane tasks such as clearing minefields.
Brooks went on to the project of “raising” a robot
“child” named Cog—a clever allusion to cognition and
gears. Ironically, in abandoning AI’s traditional attempts
to model human intelligence, Brooks and Cog hold out
the possibility of redefining what it means to be human
and intelligent.