As always, there's an XKCD [1] for this!
Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?
#12It’s funny, when I’ve seen this demonstrated, it’s basically literally impossible to get the right result because the test maker doesn’t define an instruction set that you can rely on. They will deliberately screw up whatever instructions you give them no matter how detailed. A computer has a defined ISA that is specified in terms of behavior. A compiler transforms a language with higher level abstractions into this…
Oh I think this lesson teaches quite a lot. Maybe your instructor is deliberately screwing up, but perhaps other end users are just not paying attention, or are missing assumed knowledge, or are feeling particularly adversarial on the day they need to follow your instructions.
One of many lessons that can be taken away from this exercise is to understand your audience and challenge the assumptions you make about their prior knowledge, culture, kind of peanut butter, et deters.
Re: Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?
#13It’s almost like we need some deterministic set of instructions that can be fed to a machine and followed reliably? Like… I don’t know… a “programming language”?
I would say that's exactly not the solution, since the surface area is too large to hard code (which is somewhat the point of this). Evidence being, it's 2026 and there are exactly 0 robots that can do this simple task reliably, in any kitchen you put it in.
You need something general and flexible, dare I say "intelligent", or you'll be babysitting the automation, slowly adding the thousand little corner cases that you find, to your hard coded decision tree.
This is also why every company with a home service robot, that can do anything even remotely complex as a sandwich, are doing it via teleoperation.
Re: Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?
#14Demonstrations like this are a regular feature of the Japanese educational TV show "Texico", which teaches logical thinking with the specific goal of preparing young children for programming. I highly recommend it. It's extremely well made, and quite entertaining even for adults. It's available in English, 10 minutes per episode, no subscription required: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/texico/
Texaco + Mexico = Texico? The Japanese never fail to amuse foreigners with their naming.
Re: Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?
#15This feels like a buzzfeed quizz for developers. If you think about each step long enough you can't really get a wrong answer
Re: Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?
#16There is an alternative to describing the (subjective) “process”. That is to describe a model of the sandwich - the parts and how they can collaborate. The issue is that how to do that is forgotten and unfashionable.
Re: Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?
#17Demonstrations like this are a regular feature of the Japanese educational TV show "Texico", which teaches logical thinking with the specific goal of preparing young children for programming. I highly recommend it. It's extremely well made, and quite entertaining even for adults. It's available in English, 10 minutes per episode, no subscription required: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/texico/
Texaco + Mexico = Texico? The Japanese never fail to amuse foreigners with their naming.
Texas?
Re: Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?
#18It’s kind of interesting relating this to LLMs. A chef in a kitchen you can just say you want PB&J. With a robot, does it know where things are, once it knows that, does it know how to retrieve them, open and close them. It’s always a mystery what you get back from an LLM.
Re: Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?
#19Of course, we need to give the robot a cognitive architecture so that it understands the task, the context, and corrects its actions, and then it will autonomously make such sandwiches every morning for breakfast.
Re: Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?
#20It’s kind of interesting relating this to LLMs. A chef in a kitchen you can just say you want PB&J. With a robot, does it know where things are, once it knows that, does it know how to retrieve them, open and close them. It’s always a mystery what you get back from an LLM.
Also true of specifications. Anything not explicitly stated will be decided by the implementer, maybe to your liking or maybe not.