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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Isaac Asimov's First Law of Robotics states that "a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." That sounds simple enough — but a recent experiment shows how hard it's going to be to get machines to do the right thing.
Roboticist Alan Winfield of Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK recently set up an experiment to test a simplified version of Asimov's First Law. He and his team programmed a robot to prevent other automatons, acting as proxies for humans, from falling into a hole.
