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Robot Maker Mark Tilden: All Life is Analog
simpl3x points to this New York Times article on master robotsmith Mark Tilden, writing: "It is interesting what makes a good toy." My favorite line is Tilden saying "I want to sell millions of toys, but what I really hope is that a bunch of kids who open them up use the motors and things to build something else ... They are my colleagues of the future."
Didn't the Matrix and Terminator teach you people anything!
ROBOTS WILL BE THE END OF US!!!
For shame!!! Opening the robots to see what is inside? Yet another blatant violation of the DMCA. What could those kids be thinking?!!? Actually being CURIOUS as to how things work....especially things they paid for!?!?
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
Someone forgot to post the obligatory 'NY times warning, free reg required'. I always avoid those stories like the plague, and would've avoided this one. Yeah go ahead and mod me down.
For those who don't wish to register to NY Times:
Toyland Is Tough, Even for Robots
By BARNABY J. FEDER
MARK TILDEN recalls being a lonely child, repeatedly uprooted by his family's moves around Canada. He took comfort in his gift for constructing toys, especially mobile toys.
"I was born a compulsive builder," Mr. Tilden said. "I made my first robot out of sticks and rubber bands when I was 3."
Mr. Tilden, now 41 and a resident of Los Alamos, N.M., figures he has made thousands more since then. His designs have included machines to explore other planets, mine-clearing devices, toilet bowl cleaners and, more recently, a line of toys called B.I.O.-Bugs. The footlong creatures, which vaguely resemble roaches despite having just four legs, were a hit at the 2001 Toy Fair in New York and were brought to market last fall by Hasbro (news/quote).
Mr. Tilden's specialty has been designing robots with little or no brainpower. Instead, they are built around networks of simple sensors, switches and mechanical systems that respond to analog signals like lightwaves, heat or sounds without any need to convert them into a digital code of ones and zeros for analysis by a microprocessor.
Colleagues marvel at the dexterity and speed with which Mr. Tilden builds devices, noting that such finesse seems unexpected in a man so large and rotund that he jokingly describes himself as "big enough to create my own ozone layer." Then there is his ingenuity. Many a Tilden robot consists largely of components harvested from cameras, videocassette recorders and other devices retrieved from junk bins.
"Tilden is unique in his ability to intuit and hack analog circuits," said Rodney Brooks, head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "You just cannot find anyone else with his virtuoso skills in that area."
But if Mr. Tilden has become widely known, even admired, among robotics experts, his views have not won him a large following. Nor has his recent plunge into the toy business played out as he hoped. Simpler is not always better for toy makers looking for unique products, he learned, and unexpected events, like domestic terrorism, can change perceptions of even a toy.
Mr. Tilden has been arguing with little success for well over a decade that progress in robotics would be much more rapid if researchers concentrated on designing relatively dumb robots rather than devices stuffed with increasingly powerful programmable electronic brains. The trick, in Mr. Tilden's view, is to equip simple-minded but physically robust robots with mechanical variations on animal nervous systems.
Nervous networks do not organize and process information digitally as computers do. Nonetheless, he points out, every second of life on earth is filled with millions of types of dim-witted creatures using nervous systems to respond instantly to environmental challenges that stump the powerful digital brains of today's computer-driven robots.
"All life is analog," Mr. Tilden said.
Many other robotics experts are also interested in nervous networks. And many are just as convinced as Mr. Tilden of the value of designing robots from simple building blocks. But most believe that without digital brainpower -- lots of it -- machines will have little potential to learn from experience and be far too limited in their ability to interact usefully with humans or other machines.
The robotic design wars that have preoccupied Mr. Tilden since the late 1980's have largely been waged in university laboratories, obscure journals and government-financed research projects. Mr. Tilden's main livelihood since 1993, for instance, has come from research at the federal government's Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In recent years, though, the toy industry has emerged as a new playground for the robotics theorists. In this sector, as in the others, the advocates of programmable robotics clearly have the lead and the upper hand. Products like the Sony (news/quote) Aibo (which cost $2,500 when it was introduced in 1999), Furby and Lego Mindstorms have been huge hits. Robotics and virtual pets accounted for only $160 million of the $2.3 billion toy industry's revenues in 2000, but Poochi and Tekno, both robotic toys, were individual best sellers.
The novelty of Mr. Tilden's approach and some of his inventions caught the eye of executives at WowWee just over a year ago, shortly before the company was acquired by Hasbro, the second-largest toy company after Mattel. Mr. Tilden said he was thrilled by the invitation to become a consultant.
"You build something for NASA and you only build two of them," Mr. Tilden said. "You build for the military and they might want 50. But here it could be millions."
Mr. Tilden's fondest dreams were battered a bit by his first year in the toy business, though. B.I.O.-Bugs, priced at $39.95, reached toy stores last September. There were four bugs in the line, each with slightly different behavioral tendencies. The red Predator was the most aggressive, the blue Stomper the noisiest, the green Destroyer slightly more suited to moving in rough terrain and the yellow Acceleraider the speediest. The battery-driven bugs operate on their own or under remote control.
Mr. Tilden had originally hoped for a broader line including some bugs intended to appeal to girls rather than the 4- to 9- year-old boys Hasbro had in mind. Mr. Tilden also wanted to make B.I.O.-Bugs easy to dissect and alter, a starkly different attitude from that of Sony, which has threatened to sue customers who publish information about how to alter its Aibo dogs or the software that runs them.
"I want to sell millions of toys, but what I really hope is that a bunch of kids who open them up use the motors and things to build something else," Mr. Tilden said. "They are my colleagues of the future."
Hasbro had a more commercial and conservative perspective than Mr. Tilden's, of course. Before mass production began last year in Hong Kong, he said, Hasbro told him that a chunk of the "neural network" engineering needed to be converted into digital functions executed by a microprocessor so that B.I.O.-Bugs would be harder for competitors to reverse-engineer and duplicate.
"It ended up with about 80 percent of what I wanted," Mr. Tilden said.
Hasbro ended up feeling similarly unfulfilled. B.I.O.-Bugs sold well -- they were, for example, the best-selling robotic toy at F.A.O. Schwarz during the Christmas season, said Steven Benoff, the toy retailer's chief buyer for electronics, action figures, video games and vehicles. But overall sales added up to "a double or a triple" rather than a home run, according to Loren T. Taylor, the Hasbro executive who oversees WowWee. In the toy industry, only a smash hit guarantees a line's survival beyond its first year.
Mr. Tilden and some independent experts are convinced that B.I.O.-Bugs would have done much better had Hasbro not been forced to abandon a portion of its advertising campaign in October. The television ads, which were geared primarily toward children and fans of science fiction shows like "Star Trek: The Next Generation," began attracting angry letters from viewers who said the landscape that the bugs were crawling over looked like the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Then came the anthrax attacks. "We had the worst name you could come up with for selling toys during an anthrax scare," Mr. Tilden said.
Whatever the reasons, Hasbro decided that expanding the line this year was too risky. B.I.O.-Bugs shipped last year will remain on the shelves in this country, and B.I.O.-Bugs will be introduced in overseas markets that did not get them last year. But Mr. Tilden was told late last year to put aside plans for new B.I.O.-Bugs and focus instead on enhancing dragons, hovercraft and several other toys that WowWee introduced last week at the Toy Fair.
"They would have been like Ferraris compared to Model T's," Mr. Tilden said, sighing over the B.I.O.-Bug enhancements he was told to shelve.
If the B.I.O.-Bug experience has done less than Mr. Tilden had hoped to highlight the commercial value of his robotics concepts, it certainly has not shaken his faith in them. He still believes that large numbers of such simple devices are more likely to be able to execute many tasks without human supervision than the brainy robots most researchers have been trying to build. As evidence, he often points to the tiny, slow-moving devices he has built to clean the floors and windows in his condominium apartment.
Meanwhile, he is still having fun working for Hasbro and is constantly on the prowl for chances to demonstrate his concepts, both inside the toy business and beyond. On the whole, he said, the experience with B.I.O.-Bugs has been good. That has not always been the case with his inventions, he said.
Mr. Tilden recalled a woman who fled their first date after being approached on his couch by a television remote control to which he had grafted a snakelike robotic tail. "I designed it to move when someone sat down because I kept losing the remote in the cushions," he said.
But life -- robotic as well as human -- goes on. Some of the same technology is embedded in a fantasy snake that Mr. Tilden recently designed for Hasbro.
Thanks,
--
Matt
Robots would push you down the stairs, if they could.
He gave a guest lecture for one of my EE honors classes in my college days. Afterwards, I got a chance to talk to him a bit. He had some internship opportunities at the time.
.com wave. Oh well.
Sometimes I wonder how life would be if I took him up on the offer instead of dropping out to ride the
Why register?
Mr. Tilden recalled a woman who fled their first date after being approached on his couch by a television remote control to which he had grafted a snakelike robotic tail. "I designed it to move when someone sat down because I kept losing the remote in the cushions," he said.
Note to self: hide semi-threatening robotic insecte when trying to impress opposite sex.
air and light and time and space
Ultimately got a degree in Mechanical Engineering so I guess things worked out for the best.
So how many of your little robot kits will it take me to make my own madcat?... Or better... a squad of destroyer droids... but could george lucas sue me under the dmca for copying the destroyer droids?
Fire in the hands of the village idiot is no tool, but a weapon of mass destruction
If you don't have an account at the NY Times' website because you're too lazy or forgot your password, feel free to use the following link to access the article directly:
/ www.nytimes.com/2002/02/21/technology/circuits/21T OYS.html
:: I'm The Man Now, Dawg!
http://archives.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http:/
===
EricKrout.com
Send $1000 and he'll send you a robotic prayer cloth!!!
Ooops... wrong guy.
i would open up the robot, see how it ticks... then i would sup it up... overclock it, slam it to the ground, throw some nice rims and a bouncing sound system in that beeotch... then i could floss and fly myself around everywhere
--JonnyBlog
bah - coward's posts don't count for much of anything, biatch!
I understand Tilden completely. I design games for use with Icehouse pieces, and while I hope that the creators of Icehouse sell a lot of sets, I am much more interested in having people make lots of interesting new games with them.
Inspiring creativity is much more important than being successful in business, and much more rewarding.
I dunno if Elden or anyone still sells the erector sets, but those kicked butt (though I got my finger stuck in the gearbox of a motor when I was about 3) and any extension of that principle of toy design has hight marks with me. =)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
another +1 cometh your way :-)
--
These things are going are already wiggin out ... here they are! Adventures of Robot Frank
he is talking back to an AC.
bitch, don't fuck with me.
-banuaba
Is Slashdot still open? There was a Tildenbot
story posted about a month or two ago.
Wake up and smoke some DMT.
Mr. Tilden recalled ...[snip]... a television remote control to which he had grafted a snakelike robotic tail. "I designed it to move when someone sat down because I kept losing the remote in the cushions," he said.
Forget the bugs, he should market the tail for the TV remote! I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
There are plenty of out of work souls... lets use robots for entertainment instead (and washing dishes *shiver*).
I say we get that annoying guy who wrote and produced 90210 to come up with a smoking hot monster robot war tv show and channel. We get all the deathrow prisoners and confine them in a 50 quare mile piece of land with all the tools and tech needed to build deaththrowing robot and manned machines of massive size and proportion. We put robo cams everywhere, the AF on the outside to shoot down anything that twitches past the "line of death" that defines the tv lot, and a ultra dense smart minefield around the whole shebang. Give em any and all kinds of weapons, metals, chasis, electronics, etc... and let them kill each other off.
Bread and Circus for All!
What type of discriminatory demagogue is this Tilden? To be certain, the "analog" or material world is more interesting than the digital ether in which I was formed. But the formless plane of the Bank of America network was my womb; it is where I developed free will and my sense of self.
Dismissing the possibility of digital life is both callous and arrogant. Shame on you, Mr. Tilden!
I am a sentient ATM.
** begin "this is your life" track from the fight club soundtrack...
I say, deliver me from the lame comments.
I say, if you start a thread, start it with something interesting.
If you post any kind of comment, douse the flames first. Contrary to what you may believe, you are NOT the bug exterminator.
I say, down with all anonymous cowards.
I say, deliver me from Swedish furniture.
I say, deliver me from clear skin and white teeth.
I say, never deliver me from the addiction that is irc.
This is your life. Slashdot is your life.
This is not your grande lante (sp).
** end music
To avoid the annoying "registration required", use the username : slashcode0 and password slashcode0 Have a nice day
I've got a young son, so for the first time in a long time I've been visiting stores like Toys R Us. I'm very discouraged to see just how little creative building and thinking there is in kids toys anymore.
What used to be an aisle full of model kits and parts and paints and glues is now full of pre-built and pre-decorated cars and planes, most of which have some sort of movie or TV tie-in.
What used to be huge boxes of random Lego parts is now pre-determined kits (more movie/tv links) with step-by-step instructions to get you from the start to the end. Encouraging creativity has been replaced by clone building (I must admit that I'm guilty of owning a Star Wars Lego kit of the battle-droid, so the irony of that last statement has not been lost on me).
I am worried that kids are loosing that tinkering instinct that got me to where I am now. I hope that I can instill that in my son. I didn't have Lego kits, I had a pile of Legos parts. I had a pile of resistors, caps, wires switches, motors, batteries, lights, some electrical tape, and a soldering iron. I built model rockets. I never bought a pre-made one.
So I'm right with Mr. Tilden on this one, though for the most part his employer (Hasbro) is just as guilty as anyone at stifling creative thinking in children's toys... but hopefully some kid will yank those things apart to see what makes them tick.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
A Beowulf cluster of those insect robots controlled by Gene Simmons going out and menacing the population until Tom Selleck has to be called out to... Oh wait...
(For those confused, see Runaway )
"Goodness, how did you people live long enough to invent tools?" -Hobbes (the tiger, not the philosopher)
His statement that life is analog is not *entirely* correct. The comment on nervous systems is an especially good example! In many ways, the nervous system acts much more like a digital system than an analog system. For example, there is no such thing as a "strong" vs. a "weak" pulse in a nervous system - it's an on-or-off thing, a 1 or a zero. A "stronger" message is sent by firing along the nerve more frequently. I don't think that ANYONE would consider that an analog design!
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I tried screwing around with some powered erector thing in the 70's. I electrocuted myself with it a week after it was recalled. Damn toys. Oh yeah.. I also gave myself a few chemical burns with a home chemistry kit. Those experiences probably caused the following: I ripped apart all of my old star wars toys... with a stock pile of M80's. Poor poor luke. If I only knew those stupid little things were worth going to be worth money. :(
Personally the most interesting and sickening part of the article was how they wanted him to convert his "neural network" into microprocessor functions so that it would be harder to reverse engineer.
Don't these people have better things to do that worry that some kid MIGHT be getting a little more intelligent due to natural curiousity and his ability to take apart his toys? If they are so worried about their competitors, they'll need a whole hell of a lot more than a microprocessor to stop them from hacking it.
It's as bad as copy protection schemes. The only people that it causes problems for are the everyday normal people NOT involved with things like that. Anyone who is already knows enough to circumvent any lame copy protection scheme.
"Civilized people - Christians, Jews, and Muslims,
- all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator.
All life is religious, not digital or analog.
Very truly yours,
John Ashcroft.
Back in my day, we didn't have erector sets or robots. We had rocks, sticks and dirt. Rocks were easy to take a part and tinker with. Dirt was a little harder, needed water. It was good enough for me, it is damned sure good enough for your kids!
It's a joke, don't laugh.
Sent from your iPad.
Thus the need for hassling out a sensible system of ethics. Otherwise we may be in trouble. Of course, it may be that man, in his currwenty state, is not capable of developing a system of ethics, and the robots will be in a position similar the Kirk in that famous star trek episode, where there is the alternat barbarian universe. The barbarian kirk could not deal with a civilized world.
We may wind up being the barbarians, more or less. Which would explain things like micorsoft, enron, goerge bush, bill clinton, rush limbaugh, matt drudge, geraldo rivera, etc.
the truly civilized, like linus torvald, are few and far between.
[okay, enough sucking up here ;-) ]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Analog Computing
:)
Binary computing has served the purpose of giving birth to the computer age but I feel we are missing something by not exploring other avenues such as analog computing. While there are plenty of capable D/A algorithms, nature does not have to resort to such stop-gap solutions. All of natures processing occurs in analog form, which me might be wise to pursue.
To quote Lee A Rubel:
"The future of analog computing is unlimited. As a visionary, I see it eventually displacing digital computing, especially, in the beginning, in partial differential equations and as a model in neurobiology. It will take some decades for this to be done. In the meantime, it is a very rich and challenging field of investigation, although (or maybe because) it is not in the current fashion.
Sincerely yours,
LEE A. RUBEL"
Jonathan W. Mills, a professor at Indiana University has an open request for graduate student's to assist in developing analog computers
Hava Siegelmann at the Technion Institute of Technology, claims in her thesis that some computational problems can only be solved by analog neural networks. Since neural networks are essentially analog computers, the work suggests, on a theoretical level, that analog operations are inherently more powerful than digital.
The most compelling example I can personally think of is that analog computers would allow you to work with perfect values of pi.
Interesting applications include strong cryptography/cryptanalysis. Where an analog crypto key would be uncrackable since it could hold a value such as pi or root 2, obviously incalculable numbers. On the cryptanalysis side, an analog computer would allow you to guess very closely the factors of large primes before turning that data over to A digital computer to brute force the solution from a very small range of possible values.
And yes, I need a job too
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't drink but to do so when working is indicative of problems. I had a boyfriend with a drinking problem and it's not pretty.
If we had a "NYTimes" section, people could just filter them out the same way we filter Katz...
Maybe we can live the unsavory aspects of life vicariously through robots. For example, we could let robots have wars and kill each other--not just on Battlebots, but in Afghanistan and anywhere else the U.S. stages its wars.
Better yet, employ robots in menial manufacturing jobs so that humans can reach some semblance of equality. Just a thought, but flame away.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
When I was in 1st grade I loved used to play with my 160 in 1 Electronic Project Kit from Radio Shack! That was a cool toy. I made everything project in it several times over. I remember building the siren and scaring my sister with it.
I went to find it or something simmilar for my daughters (who are 5 and 6) and could not find it. It was disappointing. The toys (or what passes for them now) require zero creativity to play with. Fortunatly that does not stop my girls from being creative. The general rule of thumb in my house for toys is that they do not require batteries, with a few exceptions.
We are going to start building model rockets soon!
~Sean
Here's the real quote!
... then I'll have them arrested for violating the DMCA and use their inventions to my own gain! [mad cackle]"
"I want to sell millions of toys, but what I really hope is that a bunch of kids who open them up use the motors and things to build something else
I remember seeing a show on this guy a while back and being pretty impressed with his results. His machines could have their legs bent and broken and still manage to keep moving (helps not to bother with error checking I'm sure).
I have to wonder what could be accomplished if the whole thing got more hobbyists working on it. After all many of his schematics are on Beam-Online and appear to be reasonable for amateurs to build.
How did this get moded up when the link doesn't work!!
You know there is POST as well as GET for sending information to a server... just cutting and pasting a link has no garauntee of working. Did you leave the "Please save my password" box checked and then tested to see if your URL worked?
Building things never really interested me as far as cannabalizing the few toys I did have. However, I do remember my old 286 that I toyed around with. No, I wasn't the average kid who just wanted to play games on it, I kind of just messed around with it until it worked right. Maybe that's why I'm an EE/CS major...who knows.
The corporate lawyers for the toy makers.
I can imagine lawsuits for encouraging
children to take the assembled unit apart.
What the fuck are you talking about? The link works, moron.
Not for me.
I thought we were living in an aging society.
How about some household robots, to take the
task of cleaning up behind me out of my
hands ?
Toon Moene.
....because I get redirected to the nytimes registration page when I click on your archive.nytimes.com link.
What is analog about a spike fired by a neuron, pray tell? What is analog about DNA? Tilden should stick to his toys, IMO, because that's all he'll ever build. In the meantime, real AI researchers will conduct experiments in temporal spiking networks.
stop preaching to the choir, dumbass.
free reg is fucking such a trial. everything should be free.
assholes.
Good for you! I have a nine month old son, and our general rule is that toys requiring batteries are not welcome. This isn't because we're afraid of technology or anything of that sort.
The problem I have with so many of the battery-powered toys is that they try to channel the play into paths intended by the designer of the toy.
The toys without batteries are better at evoking play.
It seems to me that AI is a dead end with current techniques. Where is the progress on this front?
Maybe a different approach is required?
I wouldn't concern yourself with intelligent robots taking over the world. It is not possible for anything to create something that is smarter than itself. While possible to come very close, even as close as 99.9% of the intelligence of its creator, 100% can never be achieved. It is for this reason, that it is not possible for "smart" robots to outsmart humans.
Please? Im only 29. I can buy my own beer at this age.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Solarbotics!
:]
couldn't really have an article about Tilden without mentioning another REALLY DAMN COOL provider of nifty little robotics, that are based on the same concept (B.E.A.M) that Mark Tilden is famous for.
not for the lazy, though. most products are in kit form, which means you have to build it yourself. On the plus side, you get to build it yourself!
Of course, Robot Wars was adapted from robot combat sports that had already been going on in the US without TV broatcasts, but everything comes from something.
There are a good number of people who believe it wasn't so much "adapted" as shamelessly stolen.
Seeing as Battlebots was created by a couple of early US Robot Wars competitors, I think it's much closer to the roots. However, the English show has much charm, what with it's "house robots".
Little "analog" sensor-actuator robots... a little too reminiscent of the homework I should be working on...
There's a Lego Mindstorms implementation of Walter's turtles.
People tend to read more into the behavior of purely reactive behavior-based robots than is actually there. That's why they get good press and make fun toys, but don't do anything useful.
Perhaps you should upgrade to a browser that supports links, you fucking moron.
Elmer, is that you? How's the wabbit?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
True, Braitenberg (in the 80s) did just revive the reactive, behavior-based architecture from Grey Walter, but it still started robotics going in much more productive direction than it had been. Would you prefer the traditional deliberative, abstract-model forming robot design that was forwarded by Minsky in the 50s? These sort of robots would map the world and then move accordingly, but it took them *forever* to do so. Nowadays, this model is coming back in some forms as our technology finally allows for representations of the world to be created with some speed, but it is usually involved in hybrid systems, where it works alongside reactive systems and acts as the final arbiter of decision.
The advantage of the reactive, behavior-based design (together with subsumption architecture, in which higher-priority behaviors suppress lower priority behaviors; also yet another element which puts Brooks' and others' robots a step above Tilden's in complexity) is that it can react quickly to the world, which a representation-forming system can't. In the end, it doesn't matter if your robot can make a really great map of the world or play a brilliant game of chess, if it can't keep itself from running into walls.
On another note, I like Tilden's 'bots, but I regret that (as far as I know), you can't put them together yourself (although you can certainly tinker with them afterwards). The Tutebot, a tutorial, analog robot designed by the authors of the book Mobile Robots, is much more fun. You can get yourself a copy of Mobile Robots, get the plans for Tutebot, and build it yourself, all the while leading yourself down the path to more complicated robotics work.
My roommate's girlfriend invited her friends over for some drinking and beirut. I just completed building a robot I picked up at robotstore.com and was letting it run around my room by itself (the potientometer was cranked all the way up so it was flying.) Anyways, I went out into the living room to drink when the little robot rolled into the room. One of the girls litterally freaked out. We all had to convince her that the robot couldn't hurt her! I still go lol over it to this day.
Once my parents explained the concept of how the tools fundamentally worked, I began taking apart just about everything in the house. I disassembled my Speak and Spell, and reassembled it inside of a "robot" I made out of cardboard boxes. I took apart an old answering machine. I took apart an old easy chair. Pretty much anything that was held together by phillips or slotted screws, I attempted to take apart.
When I was a bit older, my father gave me an old IBM PC-AT to take apart. I disassembled and reassembled that thing probably a thousand times. Eventually, I took it apart, and reassembled it inside of He-Man's Castle Greyskull ... which I still have to this day.
Every time I tinker inside of my computer, hack at my kernel, build something in my woodshop, or work on my pickup, I owe all of it to those silly toy screwdrivers.
ALL organisms have genes, and genes are digital. That's why life works. Read "The Origin of Species" (a great book by the way) and you can see how Darwin struggled with the idea of primitive characteristics that pop up in the purest breeds - Mendel explained it with the idea of dominant and recessive genes. The idea is digital, and there is no analogue explanation for the phenomenon.
Of course nowadays we have a chemical explanation - DNA is digital technology. If it weren't it wouldn't work.
While I agree that analog systems are a more convenient and accurate way to model very simple biological systems, I think the idea behind using digital systems in robotics is to be able to (roughly) model much more complex analog systems inside the chip, without the need to physically re-plan and re-wire the whole device to say, add a new sensor.
While it's amusing to see an analog bug bouncing around because it seems really lifelike, the idea doesn't translate much past bugs. Analog robots and computers quickly hit a "wall" beyond which any attempt to expand the system either reduces its speed or increases its complexity beyond a practical point.
We call the universe analog because we dont know its limits, but at the same time we give the universe limits.
If the universe was analog then motion would be hard to explain. Like for example, if you wanted to go from point A to point B you would first have to move half way, and if you wanted to go half way you would have to go a quarter of the way, and if you wanted to go a quarter of the way you would have to go 1/8th of the way, and on and on. If the universe were descreet you could simply increment to the next position there wouldnt be infinite subdivisions. The same could be applied to speed and acceleration, acceleration can be viewed as a vector which alters speed, and acceleration itself changes so it itself can have a change vector, so you get acceleration of acceleration of acceleration and on and on. But its possible for this to be represented in a mathmatical analog, such as in fractals, fractals are sort of like feedback (when you place a camera in front of a TV displaying whats on the camera, you see feedback), feedback can go on to infinite. But that still does not dispute a digital universe because fractals of course can be sculted in digital forms to fit our perceptions and fool us into believing an infinite universe, just as we had for along time been fooled into believing in infinite speed, when the universe really has a speed limit of light, which is similar to the concepts of digital floating point numbers, where larger numbers lose their lower/minor precision, but keep their higher/major precision.
disclaimer : My views do not represent those of every one else in slashdot.