  Early ventures in robotics took on board the idea that cognition is computation over symbolic representations. The robot Shakey (1966–1972) for instance, created at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at what was then the Stanford Research Institute, was programmed to navigate through a room, avoiding or pushing blocks of various shapes and colors. Guiding Shakey’s behavior was a program, called STRIPS, which operated on symbolically encoded images of the blocks, combining them with stored descriptions of Shakey’s world. As the roboticist Brooks characterizes Shakey’s architecture, it cycles through iterations of sense-model-plan-act sequences (Brooks 1991a). A camera senses the environment, a computer builds a symbolic model of the environment from the camera images, the STRIPS program combines the model with stored symbolic descriptions of the environment, creating plans for a course of action. Shakey’s progress was slow—some tasks would take days to complete—and heavily dependent on an environment carefully structured to make images easier to process.