Slashdot Mirror
MIT Robot Walks On Water
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at MIT have solved the
mystery of how water striders propel themselves across water surfaces and in the
process have created a robot called Robostrider
that mimics the behavior. With cool stuff like this, it's no wonder
MIT is number one in engineering."
Yes, this particular research project is very cool.
However, since it was mentioned in the original post, I will say that USN&WR's rankings are flawed, and do not necessarily reflect the quality of research taking place at a particular institution. In fact, a significant portion of their rankings are based on name recognition alone, which has nothing to do with quality of research.
As one of many in the "new guard" of AI researchers, I say that Minsky's ideas, while important in their historical perspective, overshadow the vast possibilities of artificial and computational intelligence by overemphasizing their importance due to the fame and mystique surrounding the name "Minsky".
problem is, minsky spends too much time debunking good theory than creating new ones. let's take an example. minsky proved that 2-layer neural networks were not capable of generalizing to many tasks. the proof is indeed notable, but then came *gasp* three layer neural networks, and minsky's point was irrelevant. i think he is just pissed that his ideas were mostly abandoned by AI researchers.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
You see, science is not about only making big breakthoughs on things in you direct field of interest. A lot of it is small discoveries, that are used down the road in ways that people didn't think of when they made the discovery.
I'm sure no one could possibly know yet. How is grinding little pieces of glass to play with light and images going to help anyone? (He writes while wearing corrective lenses.)
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On the linked page http://www-math.mit.edu/%7Edhu/Striderweb/striderw eb.html
Someone has blotted out the intimate details of the waterstriders mating ritual. Is he seriously worried about offending someone, or is he worried about hosting a porn site? Who says political correctness has gone wrong... This is just pathetic.
I love /.! At least this poster has the general idea if not the details.
Minsky said that a single layer perceptron (just a linear discriminator) could not learn XOR. If you plot a 2-input XOR it's obviously not linearly separable. And it's not just the extra layers but rather the activation function at each perceptron that had to change.
Cool. Go build one. Scientific fame awaits you.
The problem is not floating, the problem is walking... propulsion....
> The question is about propulsion, not weight-to-surface tension ratios sufficient for flotation
Unfortunately the article doesn't make that very clear. They could spell out that the issue is locomotion, not flotation. At first I thought, what the h3ll, it's obvious that they're floating because they're not breaking the surface tension. But then they kept talking about moving and skimming and swimming, so it dawned on me that they're talking about how the walker generates forward motion on a near friction-less medium. That's where the vortices come in, quasi as a surface to push against.
It doesn't matter, I'd hire this person to the exclusion of his peers at MIT. Why? It's creative, I didn't think about it, and I can use someone whose brain works like that.
I can hire coders & designers easily. They're a dime a dozen. I can hire GOOD -> excellent coders or designers more difficultly by talking to friends of friends etc, but they exist and are plentiful enough. To hire someone that will build a rediculous thing that no one has really seen before, carry that design through to completion, and make headlines...that person I'd pay a lot of money to. He'll make me filthy rich if I'm nice to him.
I can't figure this out. I'm an apathetic agnostic (by which I mean that I care so little about religion and the question of the existence of deities that I can't even bother to call myself an atheist) and I generally find the Christian Science Monitor to be one of the more reputable publications here in the US of A. Maybe people see the word "Christian" in the title and fly off the handle?
Take a look at it, for crying out loud. The CSM is not some kind of slobbering fundamentalist rag. It's a mainstream news and information source. On the front page, I can't see a single article that could be even remotely construed as fundy jibber-jabber (Pete Sampras is retiring?) The way a lot of Slashbots react to it, you would think they were referring to something like WorldNetDaily, a site which drips with xenophobic, anti-minority, anti-gay, anti-non-Christian, borderline-fascist rhetoric.
People who are inclined to bash the Christian Science Monitor should at least take a look at it before they flame away. They might be surprised.
No it shouldn't, as what I'm quoting does not include the question mark. This is called the "logical quoting style". I know many Americans migrate punctuation inside quotes regardless of context, but I don't, and in British style it is standard.
MIT is an incubator of two things: bright engineers and alcoholics.
Humorless sig goes here.
I remember my supervisor telling me once before a demo that we had to do (in respect to showing the stuff from the demo that would actually work):
"I can walk on water...you just have to tell me where the stepping stones are"
Maybe people see the word "Christian" in the title and fly off the handle?
I'd bet some people see "Science" in the title and confuse it with the Church of Scientology.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The research/reward system discriminates against those who debunk myths. If you prove something to be false you can't patent it and make a pot of money off it. Meanwhile, your hard work has eliminated 'red herrings' allowing others to advance more quickly. Those 'successful' people then take out patents, arrived at more quickly as a consequence of your results, and prevent you from reaping the fruits of your own labour.
To add insult to injury, other (small minded?) people then denigrate you for being 'unsuccessful'.