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The Swarmbots Are Coming
Roland Piquepaille writes "For its latest issue, Wired Magazine asked several experts to tell us how the convergence between technology and biology was transforming their respective fields, from transportation to art, and even redefining life as we know it. In this special report, Living Machines, you'll discover that the nonliving world is very much alive. This summary is focused on one of the seven articles, which talks about ant algorithms and swarmbots. "Typically, a swarm bot is a collection of simple robots (s-bots) that self-organize according to algorithms inspired by the bridge-building and task-allocation activities of ants." And ant algorithms are used today to solve human problems especially in distribution and logistics."
and we all eventually become batteries after we scorch the sky...
Paul Revere couldn't have said it any better.
...including ant algorithms, simulated annealing, and fuzzy logic is M. Tim Jones' AI Application Programming.
The examples are especially helpful; they're written in nice portable C. I've been working on a little project to translate them to Ruby; porting notes and Gnuplot charts and such are here and the code for the Ant Algorithm translation is here.
The Army reading list
Swarmbots really byte.
...welcome our new swarm overlords.
for the assbots are cumming!!!
... PLEASE for the love of juses, call your machines BOXEN only!!! Not box, computer,server.....Only BOXEN! This will insure mainstreamability!!!!
linux people
Also - here is a brick. What did the house look like?
Internet, Linux, Groklaw!
Ant people!
It's a work of science fiction by Michael Criton (sp?) about this very thing.
you'll discover that the nonliving world is very much alive
We all know that.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Mute Filesharing is one of the projects talking about ant technology, with a pretty thorough description of how they use AntTech.
Mod "Overrated" instead of replying "I disagree with you," you coward.
Cool, I'll finally be able to get an ant with a laser without cheating. The spiders better watch out!
help fill in hidden movie endings @ End of the Credits
bringing Prey in the picture here to demonstrate this technology is rather non-scientific ?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
...a Beowulf cluster of swarmbots could really fuck up a picnic all while processing an assload of seti@home workunits.
Life isn't the exception, but the rule.
:-)
All you have to do is look at all the weeds that grow through the cracks in the sidewalk to come to that conclusion
What?
Support the First Amendment: Read at -1
The only thing I'd support by reading at -1 is the First Post. A right not exactly worth fighting for...
...to sort tiny screws in space?
How computers can work together better than humans.
Human nature makes us think of the individual before society as a whole. We could probably accomplish a whole lot more if we were all mindless drones, doing what had to be done to finish our jobs.
Of course there would be no fun in that, so luckily we have swarmbots.
I am interested to see the applications of these bad boys in the future.
Why does /. keep posting pointers to these summaries? They add absolutely nothing whatsoever to the article.
I believe Swarmbots and related technology will have a place in future robotic missions to Mars that will precede human exploration. Spirit and Opportunity are independent explorers but future missions will (should) involve specialised rover that will cooperate with each other in mining, materials processing, construction, scientific analysis and exploration.
OpenOffice tips:richhillsoftware.com
It never ceases to amaze me how someone with a functioning brain can make the insipid leap to conclude that a friggin' algorithm is a living thing.
Either the authors are just pimping themselves or are entertaining some serious grandious god-like delusions.
No Virginia, there are no living ai or robots.
In the article they talk about emergence:
EMERGENCE describes the way unpredictable patterns arise from innumerable interactions between independent parts.
Does anyone know more about this? How do people study it, what parameters are important, etc... I'm curious.
-- Cheers!
"Sour grapes" said the fox. -- Aesop
Anyone have a pointer to a swarming algorithm that uses interval arithmetic to help reduce anomalies in behavior, etc.?
stuff |
"I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords"...
Typically, a swarm bot is a collection of simple robots (s-bots) that self-organize according to algorithms inspired by the bridge-building and task-allocation activities of ants
So they've created artificially intelligent managers. Well I guess this is better than the real thing.
The fascination with miniature robotics really amuses me, with its extremely costly and seemingly pointless projects. I know theyre not pointless/useless, but I'd think theyd get a better public response if they were building larger-scale, more prototype-like systems that had an end result. As opposed to the classic (in my mind) tiny mouse robot that followed around light sources.
Although I suppose micronizing is where to be...if you plan to sell your immediate research.
I'm sorry, but I cringe every time I see the magazine Wired mentioned along with technology prediction and even current analysis of emerging products. Wired has been a valuable cheerleader of the technology boom, but they have almost without fail fallen for the unexamined hype.
This reached its peak with the "Push" edition of the magazine, which you will no doubt remember if you were a subscriber/reader at the time. The technology never really made that much sense, certanly not in the "world-changing" ways they were talking about at the time. Add in the "new economy", those Cue-Cat scanners and the (again) world changing supposed effects of satellite phones (just to name a few off the top of my head) and Wired has quickly become the equivalent of the Sports Illustrated cover curse.
Woe to any futurologist or technologist that should find themselves prognosticating within the pages of Wired!
This reminds me of an article in the new "Innovators Section" as seen in Time magazine (January 12th '04 edition).
Essentially, it discusses Kris Pister who developed Smart Dust - a wireless network of sensors, called motes. Each mote has a chip about the size of a grain of rice that detects and records things like termperature and motion at its location. The motes have minisule radio transmitters that talk to otehr motes. With a single network of 10,000 motes, the upper limit, you could cover some 9 sq. miles - and get information about each point along the way!
Anyway, here's a brief description:
innovationwatch.com
Here is the Dust, Inc. homepage:
http://www.dust-inc.com/
Frightening technology in many respects, but I can't help but smile at the thought of the brilliance behind it all.
Regards,
-pararox-
The cow has all sorts of natural patterns that could aid us. Or what about chickens? We wouldn't want to forget about the utility of pecking at problems until they go away, would we?
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
"Horay for inanimate carbon rod!"
there ARE actually a few writers of fiction who dedicate alot of time to great research on REAL technologies, then apply it to ifcitonal scenerios.
Crichton is one of those. As is Dan Brown, Robin Cook, Tom Clancy...etc etc.
Go check out "Prey," and it will introduce you to this technology in a "fun way," and even introduce you to the inherent risks and problems we face as these technologies emerge.
with all of these tech/spec guides for work, it's nice to dumb it down with a novel every week or so! What I like to do is read one, then research the techonologies mentioned, and try to determine if they are Sci-Fi, or the real deal. Reading them is kinda like brainstorming, and gives me plenty of random knowledge ideas for me to go Google-crazy with!
try it sometime...
"I think, therefore I get paid."
I think that we will find 'living systems' everywhere we look, once we overcome the bias of the pattern matchers in our heads that make us think that our biases are the laws of the Universe.
Thinking outside my Head
Finally somebody got the reference RIGHT. Unlike these jugheads.
A-ha! But what do you call a bot that spams every particpatory blog site out there with links to "This summary" instead of plainly saying what "This summary" really is -- thinly disguised self-promotion and links back to your own blog with a straight cut and paste rip-off from the original article?
A rip-bot? A whore-bot? A Pique-bot? A je-ne-sais-quoi-bot? A Roland-bot?
Think about it.
Often I hear people talking about their robots on TV, and they say that their robots are about as intelligent as a bee or wasp. But if I compare the behaviour of a bee or wasp or whatever insect to those footballing robots I see on TV I'm not so sure. For instance you have wasps that make a hole in the ground, fly away to find some insect larva, bring it to their hole, sedate the larva, lay an egg in it, put it in the hole and close the hole. To be able to do this it must have a general idea about what a hole in the ground is and how to make it. When it is born it cannot know exactly where to make the hole because it has to find a suitable place. So how does the wasp decide where to make the hole? And it must have a pretty good memory too, to be able to find the hole back after some flying around. If you compare this behaviour of a tiny wasp to the robots we have playing football or driving around on Mars (or vacuuming our living room for that matter) I think we still have a long long way to go. This is a very interesting subject and sometimes I envy people that are just now deciding what to study :-) I'm too old to start with this now.
-- Cheers!
One of the most successful and well known drugs in the world is Viagra.
Sex sells everything, and it will sell robots.
Hell, I'd probably buy one, but I expect it to make breakfast in the morning. Preferably pancakes. Warm, fluffy pancakes. Mmmm... pancakes.
--- Ban humanity.
One sentence killed the authority of the article...
Similarly, weather develops from the mixing of oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, and other... molecules
What? Weather is all about energy, and is powered by the sun. Highs and lows are all about temperature, not the balance of elements. Mixing of elements has little to do with weather.
Sheesh!
D
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
devouring the picnickers!
You're too late.
I give the now-obligatory but wholly sincere greetings to our new teeny tiny robotic overlords.
-Styopa
It's only a matter of time before someone posts the obligatory "I, for one, welcome our miniature robotic overlords."
Yes, but I, for one, welcome our posting-about-miniature-robotic-overlords overlords.
Tweet, tweet.
If you want to see some cool demonstration of ant behavior algorithm check this web site Eurobios
someone did, a mere 8 minutes before you!
you said it, and it happened! right here in this posti d=8182 650
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=95540&c
The technology behind Google's great results
known as
.
The Santa Fe Institute
This is not news.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Regards,
Kilgore
Talk about brilliant, Gary Larson is one funny and intelligent guy. We need a swarm of Larsons.
haha so wait, this is like the organic version of bittorrent?
send 10000 of these things to take a tiny piece of something and then they can rebuild it! mwahaha!
bring one.... one cow! go swarmbots!
maybe my ideas should be more gregarious, but eh. I'm selfish.
Your high horse, that is.
Maybe the guy is not a meteorologist?
Only a matter of time...
Actually a pretty good book, too.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
To be able to do this it must have a general idea about what a hole in the ground is and how to make it.
I don't think there's any reason to assume that insects have ideas the way we think (of) "ideas". However, they do seem to have behaviour programmed into them... and that's plenty interesting and cool.
I've sometimes wondered whether ants, with their chemical communication systems, might not in effect form a single distributed organism, with its neurotransmitters on the outside.
Cheers!
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
And none of you geeks out there caught the Stanislaw Lem reference? I am disappointed.
After a bit of Googling, I was a bit startling at something the article mentioned. Then again, this is the new issue of Weird. =)
On the last page/section of the article, you'll see "Will Wright's Grand Unified Theory". Wasn't Will Wright the guy that designed SimCity? Someone named Robert Wright occurs way more frequently next to "grand unified theory" on Google...
"Typically, a swarm bot is a collection of simple robots (s-bots) that self-organize according to algorithms inspired by the bridge-building and task-allocation activities of ants."
Replicators, anyone?
In all of the videos I watched on the site, NONE of the "swarmbots" appeared to robots any more than those on Battle Bots. They all had tethers, so how are they any differnt than the multibots seen on Battle Bots? They appeaered to be nothing more than RC toys with cool grabbers and flashing lights.
Don't get me wrong, the theory is cool and we could be close to the tech, but the implemenation shown is not impressive.
When they run without external control - then I'll be impressed.
I'll take free beer over free software any day.
"Then there's always "fire." It fits all the criteria, but is usually not considered alive.
It might be a question of experience.
Just as our everyday familiarity with biological life predisposes us to think of "alive" in biological terms those who are most familiar with fire - firefighters - often treat, speak and think about fire as a living thing.
They see an uncontrolled fire as malevolent, while productive if tamed (a back-fire for example). Smiths think of "their" fire as a tamed beast that imbues metalwork with vitality and other desirable attributes. People who have been in or close to a large fire, really seen it behave up close, will often speak of their experience as an interaction with a living thing.
Yes, seeing purposefulness in fire is probably illusory. But really, how much more illusory than seeing purposefulness in simple biological life?
Fire does meet the criteria. Perhaps because it is, no more or less than simple algae or viruses, alive.
Typically, a swarm mod (in other words - slash-bot) is a collection of simple mods (s-mods) that self-organize according to algorithms inspired by the karma rules, with addition of meta-moderation rules. And they are used today to solve human problems, especially in troll control.
Less is more !
The wizards of Discworld have built a computer named Hex that is powered by Ants, with bees being used for long-term information storage. Was he just lucky or 8 years ahead of the curve?
Not just answers, the correct questions.
Digital watches melt their innards when left in a car, in summer, in hell. Like many of today's tech marvels, they are extremely fragile. Life in 100 years will look back and wonder, how did they get along when everything they had failed, sooner rather than later.
.
The swarmbots official website is at www.swarm-bots.org . Go to this site for the latest swarmbots development and cool demos. Also the 3d physics-based simulator is available for academic purposes upon request, but you need a Vortex license.
I'm one of the Swarmbot developper. I have been in charge of porting Linux to the motherboard of thwe s-bot as well as writing its system software. Let's have some interesting data about the s-bot
Direct links
http://www.swarm-bots.org
http://lsa1pc65.epfl.ch/research/projects/SwarmBo
Have a nice day,
Steph
Real science guys : ;-)
IAS8-swarmbot-final
Steph
Hi,
:-)
In addition to a Swarmbot developper, I'm also making glob2, a free software game that has bio-inspired work allocation to units, thus reducing micro-managment. Try it out it's GPL
Steph
...to run... the swarmbots are already here! (detachable lasers, plasma rifles, and chainsaws not included.)
is anyone else enraged by the "get the bottom line on windows" advert currently running?
For descriptions of what swarmbots might be like in real life, I recommend three novels by Stanislaw Lem ; "The Invincible" (about self-evolving swarmbots),
"Peace On Earth" and finally "Fiasco" where swarmbots ("synsects") are used as information collectors. In "Peace On Earth" there is also mentioned the possibility that swarmbots may assemble to create larger military machines in an era when automated battlefield surveillance will make it suicidal for a conventional large vehicle to try to cross a battlefield.
Yours Birger Johansson.