Today's THE day. Today JohnBot will fight for its life, and its wealth - after all, it's also retrieving the gold. In the morning session, professor Bram was unable to come to class, so we could not work on the robot. Later in the day, however, we worked during the extra hours before the competition, trying to have the algorithm work. Eventually, we changed the algorithm due to simplicity reasons, as we found out that our combined body of knowledge on programming was not good enough to implement our former, more complicated algorithm.
After programming everything, barely before the deadline, professor Bram called the competition off, as none of the teams were ready to compete. Since we barely got to finish the code, we never had a chance to test it, so we never discovered if it actually worked. If we had had more time to work on our robots, the next logical step would've been to test our code by having JohnBot perform in the competition environment. Then, depending on whether it worked or not, we would have fine-tuned it. At the very least, we know that the code had no syntax errors, so we were hopeful on it working (if we had tried it). However, we never had a chance, and thus, JohnBot ended its run without ever confirming its potential.
Overall, we cannot determine whether JohnBot was intelligent or not, as we never actually tested his "mind." Nonetheless, even if it had worked as intended, we would not classify JohnBot as intelligent or conscious. The reasoning is that, something which picks up signals in a manner as limited as JohnBot, and that has not real ability to adapt to different experiences by itself, cannot be categorized as intelligent. As for consciousness, JohnBot evidently does not have one. In fact, our robot would be akin to a "philosophical zombie," in the sense that it merely responds to various inputs without any further thought, so it would be quite a stretch to imply it has a consciousness.
As one last conclusion, working on this project did not really change our views on A.I. What JohnBot did (or at least what it was supossed to do) was not in-depth enough to really give us a different perspective on artificial intelligence itself, or the way it's developed, and thus, it did not change our vision regarding A.I. I personally believe that working on a more in - depth project would have this effect, but I also believe that would be outside the scope of this course.
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