Talk:Positronic brain
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Is there anything In Asimov's work to indicate any connection between the positronic brain and the laws (other than the fact that they relate to robots)? If so, then the article should make this explicit. If not, then the information on the three laws is inappropriate here, and should be moved to another article.
Also, the information about Data should be separated out. Data is not one of Asimov's characters.
I'd fix this, but I'd like to see an answer to the above question first -- Daran 16:18, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)
- ERK! It is there, after all. Obviously I can't read.
Alan, I'm not familiar with Asimov's work, and I know nothing about any gravitonic brain; I merely edited a previous contributor's submission under the assumption that everything in it was factually correct. If you think that part's suspect then by all means take it out. One sanity test might be to find out when the word graviton was coined. See my personal talk page for a fuller reply to your remarks. -- Daran 14:08, 18 Sep 2003 (UTC)
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[edit] Categorization
In addition to Category:Science fiction, I re-added Category:Fictional. This is not redundant, as Category:Science fiction is not a subcategory of Category:Fictional, and rightly so, as it holds real life entitities. See also Category_talk:Fictional. As it was (for now) decided, to make Category:Fictional a hierarchical and not an aspect category, I assume some subcategory will be created in the future to make Positronic brain not a direct member of Fictional. Pjacobi 07:06, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)
[edit] DATA
The inclusion of Data and the Star Trek genre is needed and prefect in a description of Positronic Brains. The Star Trek authors used Asimov's idea (and pharse) directly. Data the Robot is therefore a 'grandchild' of Asimov.
Until this article, I had believed that the history of PB had run backwards. That is, the authors of the I,Robot movie had used the Star Trek orginated concept and grafted it onto the Asimov story. Soon there will be a generation who know Will Smith and Sonny as their first contact with Positronic Brains. They will not know of ST:NG or paper novels, except as disregarded stories of their parents. PP 17 Jan 2004
- Tragic, isnt it? --Tyr
[edit] Misc
I am skeptical that duotronic technology is a combination of electronic and positronic circuitry. The successor to duotronics was multitronics, followed by isolinear optical chips and bioneural gel packs. There was no reference at all to positronics in TOS, and it was introduced for Data in TNG as an homage to Asimov. I don't believe this claim can be sourced.
The positronic robots of Asimov's stories are artificially intelligent, but there is no suggestion in the stories that positronic brains have any sort of innate consciousness. They are imitations of human thought, with decisions about their behavior resulting mechanically from the comparision of positronic potentials. If anything, the majority of Asimov's stories show that their behavior, while complex, is mechanical and not self-aware. Hermitian 10:09, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Third paragraph
The first two paragraphs are factual paragraphs about things in the real world. They discuss Asimov's coining of positronic and his writing style. Then the third paragraph abruptly switches to some fictional universe, which is pretty confusing, especially to someone like me who has never read Asimov's work. As I began to read the paragraph, I thought that Gubber Anshaw was another author, who in the final days of the "robot era" (perhaps something like the "golden age" of science fiction?) coined a new term, gravitronic. Only as I got deeper into the paragraph did I realize that this was talking about events in a fictional universe. The third paragraph needs to have an introductory phrase, like "According to Asimov's writing" or "In the Caliban trilogy" or something like that. I would add it myself, except that I don't know anything about science fiction, so I don't know how Asimov's work and Allen's work are related, which author invented these concepts, what "the robot era" means, and so forth. —Bkell (talk) 01:12, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Relics
I've deleted the sentences about the Star Trek TNG episode 'Relics'. Duotronics is not a combination of electronics and positronics because positronics was only invented a century after duotronics in the Star Trek universe.
[edit] Buck Rogers
68.107.164.175 added this entry.
- The fictional charater Cryton TWKE4 robotic unit ]] the main robot aboard the ship called ( Searcher ) was said to have a positronic brain. This was discovered on the episode named "Off Think" dwarf. Twinky also commented that he had a positronic brain as well.
I haven't been able to verify this and the entry contains a few mistakes, so I have removed it until someone else can come along and do it properly. — Lee J Haywood 19:36, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
Both robots from Buck Rogers were, in fact, positronic - and the captain of the Searcher was Captain Asimov, a distant descendant or relative of Isaac. These elements were added as tributes to Asimov. There was an episode where Cryton's brain was damaged, and had to be regenerated - this went deeply into the notion of Positronic Brains, the platinum-iridium mesh, the Three Laws (which both robots had built in to them), etc.
71.72.199.25 15:14, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
