From Bricks to Brains

From Bricks to Brains introduces embodied cognitive scienceand illustrates its foundational ideas through the construction andobservation of LEGO Mindstorms robots. It places a renewed emphasis onsensing and acting, the importance of embodiment, the exploration ofdistributed notions of control, and the development of theories bysynthesizing simple systems and exploring their behaviour. Numerousexamples are used to illustrate a key theme: the importance of anagent's environment. Even simple agents, such as LEGO robots, arecapable of exhibiting complex behaviour when they can sense and affectthe world around them.