SAM, The Senster and the Bandit: Early Cybernetic Sculptures by Edward Ihnatowicz
Observing the Senster, and knowing just how simple the controlling program was, he “felt like a fraud and resolved that any future monster of mine would be more genuinely intelligent.” (private papers). He found it disconcerting that “people kept referring to it as an intelligent thing, but there wasn’t an iota of intelligence in it: it was completely pre-programmed responding system”
Bill Powers in Living Control Systems III, p 154:
…one can make overly complex hypotheses about how an organism accomplishes what it is doing, when the actual mechanism is much simpler. In the case of the Crowd demo, the impression of intelligence is quite misleading, for the person is doing none of the things one might read into the behavior. I know that is true because I wrote the program. The person is seeking a destination position and avoiding collisions, and that is all. No decision are made, there is no analysis of possible paths through the field of obstacles, no planning of trajectories, no remembering of past experiences, no search for a way out of a trap. The behavior we see is determined completely by the actions and interactions of two simple control processes in an environment containing randomly placed obstacles.
Various versions of the Crowd demo can be downloaded from livingcontrolsystem.com, with Crowd32.zip being the most recent version. (I actually prefer to play around with the quirky DOS version: it comes with a few more ready-made simulations and there’s just something about the speedy full screen DOS interface that works for me.)