Grey Walter Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

Walter Grey Walter

A pioneer in the field of cybernetics William Grey Walter was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1910. He was educated at Bristol University in England where he spent most of his career until his death in 1977.

Table of contents

1 Walter's work on brain waves 2 The "turtles" 3 Books and articles

Walter's work on brain waves

As a young man Walter was greatly influenced by the work of the famous Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. He visited the lab of Hans Berger, who invented the electroencephalograph, or EEG machine, for measuring electrical activity in the brain. Walter produced his own versions of Berger's machine with improved capabilities which allowed it to detect a variety of brain wave types ranging from the high speed alpha waves to the slow delta waves observed during sleep.

In the 1930s Walter made a number of discoveries using his EEG machines at Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol. He was the first to correcly locate the source of alpha waves by triangulation within the occipital lobe of the brain and demonstrated the use of delta waves to locate brain tumours or lesions responsible for epilepsy

During the second world war he worked on scanning radar technology and guided missiles , which may have influenced his subsequent alpha wave scanning hypothesis of brain activity.

In the 1960s Walter also went on to discover the contingent negative variation (CNV) effect (or readiness potential) whereby a negative spike of electrical activity appears in the brain half a second prior to a person being consciously aware of movements which they are about to make. Intriguingly, this effect brings into question the very notion of consciousness or free will, and should be considered as part of a person's overall reaction time to events.

The "turtles"

Grey Walter's most famous work was his construction of some of the first electronic autonomous robots. He wanted to prove that rich connections between a small number of brain cells could give rise to very complex behaviors - essentially that the secret of how the brain worked lay in how it was wired up. His first robots, named Elmer and Elsie, were constructed between 1948 and 1949 and were often described as turtles due to their shape and slow rate of movement. The three wheeled turtle robots were capable of phototaxis, by which they could find their way to a recharging station when they ran low on battery power. In one experiment he placed a light on the "nose" of a turtle and watched as the robot observed itself in a mirror.

"It began flickering, twittering, and jigging like a clumsy Narcissus", he wrote. If seen in an animal he argued this "might be accepted as evidence of some degree of self-awareness".

Later versions of the robots were exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Walter stressed the importance of using purely analogue electronics to simulate brain processes at a time when his contemporaries such as Alan Turing and John Von Neumann were all turning towards a view of mental processes in terms of digital computation. His work inspired subsequent generations of robotics researchers such as Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec and Mark Tilden. Modern incarnations of Walter's turtles may be found in the form of BEAM robotics.

Books and articles

 An imitation of life, Scientific American (1950)  182(5): 42—45
 A machine that learns, Scientific American (1951) 185(2): 60—63
 The Living Brain, New York (1953)
 Contingent negative variation: An electrical sign of sensorimotor 
 association and expectancy in the human brain, Nature (1964) 203: 380-384

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