🚀 go-pugleaf

The Jan 1969 issue of C&A had a "15 years ago" article that described research at Bell Labs using a computerized mouse to track its way through a maze.

The latest of Shannon's machines is a mouse which solves a
maze, as countless mice do in psychology laboratories throughout
the world. The difference is that Shannon's mouse is a
realistic, lifesize lump of gray rubber, molded around a magnet,
adorned with copper whiskers, and mobilized on three
wheels. As a maze-solver it is definitely in the super-mouse
class.

The maze is about half the size of a desk top and has
aluminum fences which can be slipped into 40 different slots
in order to create problems for the mouse. When Shannon
places the mouse at any spot in the maze, it starts scurrying
for a piece of cheese (a brass contact which rings a bell) in
one corner. Every time the animal runs head on into a fence,
it backs away, makes a quarter turn, and scuttles off in a new
direction. By this trial and error process it finally stumbles
upon the cheese. Then comes the truly extraordinary performance.

Shannon replaces the mouse in some part of the
maze. This time it proceeds surely and swiftly toward the
cheese, never so much as brushing against a fence. It has
learned the maze. If Shannon then alters the maze, the mouse
resorts to further trial and error until it has mastered the fresh
arrangement of fences.

Naturally, this ability to learn a complicated pattern and to
relearn its lesson when the pattern changes cannot yet be
crammed into so tiny a machine as the mouse's body. The
brain, indeed, is in a separate case.

Stripped of its fetching animism, this is the way the mouse
works: When it is set on the metal floor of the maze, its
magnet trips a switch under the floor. A motor-driven electromagnet
hurries to a spot directly beneath the mouse and
seizes it in a magnetic grip. The magnet turns the mouse 90
degrees and propels it forward. If the copper whiskers make
contact with a fence, closing a circuit, the magnet backs
away, turns the mouse again, and tries anew to move it forward.
Each successful sally is recorded in the mouse's brain,
which is controlled by 50 relays. Interpretively, this brain
considers the maze as a number of square sections. When the
mouse moves without interference from one section to another,
the brain registers in its memory the equivalent of: "turn
North in section 5." By the time the mouse has visited every
section, its brain has learned how to steer it clear of all blind
alleys.

Important as they may be to telephone engineers, Shannon's
machines may eventually prove to be even more significant in
the life of the average citizen - the man who knows little
about telephones beyond how to use them. For Shannon's
machines promise to be progenitors of a new breed of supergadgets,
using the control principles which he is working out.
>From the mouse it is only a short step of engineering imagination
to an automatic lawnmower which could be instructed
to pick its way through an ornamental garden, clipping the
grass without ever blundering across a flower bed. Another
might retrieve balls for tennis players. Still another might
mix and bake a cake from a selection of factory-tested recipes.