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Sluggish Software

"One cool judgement is worth a thousand hasty counsels" - Woodrow Wilson

Miscellaneous musings

How to defeat a telerobot invasion - the telerobots are incoming!
Sloman Vs IKEA - how smart are commercial chatbots?
Legends in AI - the rise and untimely demise of Chris McKinstry
Mirrors, models and minds
Tyranny of the egosphere
Windows Genuine Disadvantage
Yudkowsky speaks to the hedge funders
DOOM as a psychological phenomena
2019 - a failed future

The Projects

Sentience - a volumetric perception system for mobile robots.
Animal biometrics - spotting whales on the high seas.
MiniMind - a baby step towards the semantic web.
Little Brother and the intelligent house - using cameras to track people and vehicles, for beneficial rather than sinister purposes.
The wibbly wobbly world of Coded Delusions
Simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) with a single camera.
Behind the news - hunting for popular archetypes in news stories.
Automatic analysis of microsope images for cancer detection.
Rodney - a humanoid robot.
Time series prediction - let us gaze into the crystal ball...
Automatic number plate recognition on any vehicle which passes by.
Robocore - a neural net architecture.
Flint - an experimental anthropoid
Invariant regions - looking for areas of interest

Guru Meditations

A motley assortment of AI gurus, neuroscientists, philosophers, pioneers, visionaries, prognosticators and obsessive graph plotters

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The groundhog is like most other prophets; it delivers its prediction and then disappears.

- Bill Vaughan


    The GROK2 mobile robot takes a peek out of the window


    Simulated grid cells for spatial localisation


    The Flint anthropoid

About

Sluggish Software is the home page of Bob Mottram - software engineer, roboticist and computer vision hacker

The name for this site originates from the fact that software running on personal computers has, more often than not, been decidedly pedestrian in its rate of execution. The desire to transcend sluggishness in an arms race between software developers writing increasingly larger more complex programs and hardware manufacturers squeezing more and more transistors into a small area is what drives the computing industry. Software which is somewhat sluggish - assuming it's not just badly written - is on the outermost edge of what's possible with current technology.


Camera calibration using the Sentience software


The Rodney humanoid