alt Hacker News> neither versatile in its objective, nor programmable.
how programmable does it have to be for the robotic classification to stick? A cruise missile also cannot be programmed to be general - you can only program it to follow a trajectory. Just like you can only program a dishwasher to do dishes in a particular way.
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cowlevel • today at 11:50 AM
Most robots are programmed to do one thing well. You could program a cruise missile to fly around in circles or chase the sun, just like you could program an industrial robot arm to wave like a music conductor, but they don't because that doesn't match the goals of their users.
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Autonetics designed the inertial guidance system for the Minuteman 1 ICBM. They also sold it as a general purpose computer and distributed to Universities to learn about general purpose computers.
It took realtime input from gyroscopes and starmaps and calculated output for the thrusters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-17B