What was your impression of the CHM? What did you learn that hadn’t been covered in class? What was your favorite fact or object and why?
I really enjoyed my visit to the Computer History Museum. It had a very professional feel, filled with experts attending events or staff in uniform. There were tons of computers of all sizes I’d never seen before, ranging from tanks to artificial intelligence.
The object that I was most impressed by at CHM was the artificial intelligence robot Ameca—or should I refer to her as a person rather than an object? Her face was incredibly lifelike and remains vivid in my mind. It was my first encounter with such a realistic robot and my first interaction with one. I asked her questions like, ‘Do you speak Chinese?’ She then began conversing with me in Mandarin. Before answering, she would pause thoughtfully, her face moving and eyes rolling around as if she was really thinking. Later, intrigued by her expressions, I asked, ‘Can you wink?’ I assumed she wouldn’t understand, but after a few seconds, she actually winked at me! We were really shocked. Besides blinking, she could make many different expressions. While observing her, I thought about some facts discussed in last week’s lecture: why most conversational robots have female voices. I asked her why her voice, body shape, and facial features all had feminine characteristics. She didn’t give me an answer, just said there was no particular reason. But overall, this experience left a deep impression on me and made me wonder what the future of robot development might look like.