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When Los Alamos Scientists Make Toys
redpop350 writes: "Mark Tilden of Los Alamos National Labs {I had the privilege once of waiting on him in the local hardware store} has apparently come up with a new diversion. Here's the link to the story. Cool Toys! His earlier creations bore a lot of resemblance to these, and I am sure they will be fun." We've mentioned B.I.O. Bugs before, but this is some cool background to go along with them.
I read the article and thought pretty cool. But and this is kind of funny. Consider the following comment.
>Tilden has created an army of lifelike robotic bugs that use transistors, rather than computers, to control their actions.
If I am not mistaken a computer is nothing more than a bunch of transistors put together. Hence this is not that amazing (interesting yes).
I thought actually these bugs were the ones that were built using analog technologies. I do not know who, but there is a scientist that uses no transistors, just analog circuits.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
The article does bring up the following mental picture:
"What do you think would happen if we could build cheap little credit card floor cleaners that match your linoleum? You could toss them on the floor and all you notice is that your floor is always clean and the cockroaches are nervous,"
I just can't help but laugh out loud at the thought of cockroaches developing a complex because of the moving floor. lol!
but if you were skimming, you may have missed it:
"...The fact is kids need to build things. They need to find out just what firecrackers will do to the insides of a dead frog..."
Interesting idea, I think I shall have to find out what does happen.
(ducks)
:)
I belive a lot of people missed an IMPORTANT aspect of this story!
that is that these little bugs are a BASIC form of AI!. think about it a bug that interacts with its environment the way a little bug works and this is simulating a type of intelligence.