[ale] Intelligent Power (was global warming) [OT]

[aaron]

On Monday 03 March 2008 22:59, George Allen wrote:
> Yes, I did start a pretty good tangent - but, although 99% off topic,
> I did think it'd be pretty cool to have a linux-cluster in the form of
> a robot  swarm. ... (which, like the Matrix - the swarm would collect
> power, except  these would be friendly robots with penguins on the
> side moving around  silicon instead of angry robots incubating
> humans in pods)
> 
> http://www.inl.gov/adaptiverobotics/robotswarm/
>
> In the near future, it may be possible to produce and deploy large
> numbers of  inexpensive, disposable, meso-scale robots. Although
> limited in individual capability, such robots deployed in large numbers
> can represent a strong  cumulative force similar to a colony of ants
> or swarm of bees.

[snip]

y'all might want to read some science fiction by Stanislaw Lem.  The 
idea of microbot swarms is one of his favored themes - though mostly
as the destroyers of civilizations when their adaptability and efficiency
are (inevitably) exploited for abuse as war machines.

In one lighter short story there is an engineer who decides the best
way to manufacture really tiny micro-bots is to program a micro-bot
to build successive half scale versions of itself, bottoming out after
some reasonable number of generational iterations.  Problems came
when he realized he had left the bug of an extra 0 in the test program,
so each microbot built 10 copies of itself instead of 1. Exponential entropy 
ensued. ;-)

peace
aaron




. 

 
 microbots build