Talk:Positronic brain

The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King
Blaine the Train (and the Pain) is a robot that has a brain designed from "positronic computers", as do the rest of the robots left over from the lost "old people". The Tick-Tock man interrogates Jake about his knowledge of Positronic Computers, which are stacked by the hundreds, unresponsive, below them. Obvious references to some of the most well known stories of the Early Science Fiction genre are important to note when trying to discern the author's themes regarding stories and storytelling. Jake Papp (talk) 21:07, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

Is there
Is there anything In Asimov's work to indicate any connection between the positronic brain and the laws (other than the fact that they relate to robots)? If so, then the article should make this explicit. If not, then the information on the three laws is inappropriate here, and should be moved to another article.

Also, the information about Data should be separated out. Data is not one of Asimov's characters.

I'd fix this, but I'd like to see an answer to the above question first -- Daran 16:18, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)


 * ERK! It is there, after all.  Obviously I can't read.

Alan, I'm not familiar with Asimov's work, and I know nothing about any gravitonic brain; I merely edited a previous contributor's submission under the assumption that everything in it was factually correct. If you think that part's suspect then by all means take it out. One sanity test might be to find out when the word graviton was coined. See my personal talk page for a fuller reply to your remarks. -- Daran 14:08, 18 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Categorization
In addition to Category:Science fiction, I re-added Category:Fictional. This is not redundant, as Category:Science fiction is not a subcategory of Category:Fictional, and rightly so, as it holds real life entitities. See also Category_talk:Fictional. As it was (for now) decided, to make Category:Fictional a hierarchical and not an aspect category, I assume some subcategory will be created in the future to make Positronic brain not a direct member of Fictional. Pjacobi 07:06, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)

DATA
The inclusion of Data and the Star Trek genre is needed and prefect in a description of Positronic Brains. The Star Trek authors used Asimov's idea (and pharse) directly. Data the Robot is therefore a 'grandchild' of Asimov.

Until this article, I had believed that the history of PB had run backwards. That is, the authors of the I,Robot movie had used the Star Trek orginated concept and grafted it onto the Asimov story. Soon there will be a generation who know Will Smith and Sonny as their first contact with Positronic Brains. They will not know of ST:NG or paper novels, except as disregarded stories of their parents. PP 17 Jan 2004
 * Tragic, isnt it? --Tyr

Misc
I am skeptical that duotronic technology is a combination of electronic and positronic circuitry. The successor to duotronics was multitronics, followed by isolinear optical chips and bioneural gel packs. There was no reference at all to positronics in TOS, and it was introduced for Data in TNG as an homage to Asimov. I don't believe this claim can be sourced.

The positronic robots of Asimov's stories are artificially intelligent, but there is no suggestion in the stories that positronic brains have any sort of innate consciousness. They are imitations of human thought, with decisions about their behavior resulting mechanically from the comparision of positronic potentials. If anything, the majority of Asimov's stories show that their behavior, while complex, is mechanical and not self-aware. Hermitian 10:09, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Third paragraph
The first two paragraphs are factual paragraphs about things in the real world. They discuss Asimov's coining of positronic and his writing style. Then the third paragraph abruptly switches to some fictional universe, which is pretty confusing, especially to someone like me who has never read Asimov's work. As I began to read the paragraph, I thought that Gubber Anshaw was another author, who in the final days of the "robot era" (perhaps something like the "golden age" of science fiction?) coined a new term, gravitronic. Only as I got deeper into the paragraph did I realize that this was talking about events in a fictional universe. The third paragraph needs to have an introductory phrase, like "According to Asimov's writing" or "In the Caliban trilogy" or something like that. I would add it myself, except that I don't know anything about science fiction, so I don't know how Asimov's work and Allen's work are related, which author invented these concepts, what "the robot era" means, and so forth. —Bkell (talk) 01:12, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Relics
I've deleted the sentences about the Star Trek TNG episode 'Relics'. Duotronics is not a combination of electronics and positronics because positronics was only invented a century after duotronics in the Star Trek universe.

Buck Rogers
68.107.164.175 added this entry.


 * The fictional charater Cryton TWKE4 robotic unit ]] the main robot aboard the ship called ( Searcher ) was said to have a positronic brain. This was discovered on the episode named "Off Think" dwarf. Twinky also commented that he had a positronic brain as well.

I haven't been able to verify this and the entry contains a few mistakes, so I have removed it until someone else can come along and do it properly. &mdash; Lee J Haywood 19:36, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Both robots from Buck Rogers were, in fact, positronic - and the captain of the Searcher was Captain Asimov, a distant descendant or relative of Isaac. These elements were added as tributes to Asimov. There was an episode where Cryton's brain was damaged, and had to be regenerated - this went deeply into the notion of Positronic Brains, the platinum-iridium mesh, the Three Laws (which both robots had built in to them), etc.

71.72.199.25 15:14, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Functioning
I distinctly recall Asimov describing how, at one point, someone asked him "but Dr Asimov... how does the positronic brain actually work?" - referring to the constant electron/positron annihilation, etc - to which Asimov replied "it works very well", or words to that effect. This is because Asimov had no idea how such a device could possibly work for real, because he didn't need to; it's just a thought experiment (in more ways than one). Does anyone know where this comes from?

(Oh, and I'm going to add in a reference to David Langford's story where positronic brains are revealed to be causing radiation poisoning in humans, and therefore the robots are compelled to shut themselves down in accordance with the First Law.

Once I find my Langford collection again.) DS (talk) 14:27, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
 * its not even a thought experiment. the 3 laws is a thought experiment, the hardware is just made up stuff. just a gentle reminder that if you had positrons going through a circuit made of platinum and iridium, each positron would annihilate an electron in the metal, causing a gigantic explosion wiping out a city block.2602:304:CFD0:6350:C26:B4B0:C6B:D86E (talk) 19:47, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
 * A single e/p annihilation produces 8e-17J. That's not wiping out city blocks, that's "oh dear, if we get a few quintillion of those per sec we might have to install heatsink of some sort!"  Somehow simultaneously destroy every electron in a gram of matter, and sure, there goes the neighbourhood, but that's very much assuming facts not in evidence.  The entire point of the lack of any description of how it works is that we have no information at all on whether it's constructed to work in that manner, or to -- by some equally mysterious means -- carefully avoid it.
 * On the quote itself, I've heard it repeated about several different technobabble/maguffins, such as the Trek "Heisenberg Compensators" for example. They might all be stealing from an Asimov original, but equally that itself could just be another second-hand repurposing.  109.255.211.6 (talk) 15:17, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Positronic brain without laws
I think the reason why postronic brains in Asimovs stories always have the three laws should be better explained. A brain without the laws COULD be built, but you'd have to start from scratch using only the most basic tools. I think it would be comparable to creating a microchip without using TTL. The further advanced the brains were, the more groundwork would have to be done just to catch up.--Cyberman TM (talk) 07:31, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Positronic Lightning
In the TV series, "Eureka", there is mention of a positronic lightning storm. To my way of thinking, this is the only definable version of "positronic", i.e. a storm consisting of positrons instead of electrons (is that even possible? Certainly more possible than a brain). The positronic brain is a nice concept, and I hope to see its creation someday, complete with The Three Laws and The Zeroth Law. Yes, I read Asimov —Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.117.223.4 (talk) 05:15, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

DARPA
Seems that DARPA is working on a device they call a "Positronic Brain" based on memristors. This is interesting but my own version uses room temperature superconducting pathways formed in a non superconducting Mott insulator and nanoscale <14nm Al2O3/SiC neurosynaptic processors as a base. As the pathways are superconducting the entire brain is essentially entangled allowing quantum computations to be carried out in realtime as long as the brain is kept at the right temperature for the pathways to superconduct reliably.

This is probably patentable but I have chosen to share it in order that others may expand on my work and hopefully change the world, much as Eck has shared his work.

Positronic reference
Seems there ought to be a note that the term 'Positronic Brain' was coined by Isaac Asmiov in his 1941 short story "Reason", in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. aajacksoniv (talk) 13:22, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

trivia
this doesnt exist, it never will exist (positrons are antiparticles), its a Mcguffin of sorts, or "tech" fill in word. its use in other creative works is interesting but not that important. this article appears to be very "crufty".(mercurywoodrose)2602:304:CFD0:6350:C26:B4B0:C6B:D86E (talk) 19:45, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Interesting sketch proof offered there about how PET scanners are a flight of fantasy! On notability, there's a couple of third-party sources given, so it's not necessarily a hopeless case.  OTOH is the concept independently notable?  Less clear.  If not, upmerger to Three Laws of Robotics might be a possibility.  109.255.211.6 (talk) 15:26, 30 August 2022 (UTC)