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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...
...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.
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
...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?
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.
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-
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
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.
This comment you made just proves that you've never really thought of the question.
The question is: what defines something as alive or inert? the boundary has always been fuzzy, and endless philosophical debates on the subject have been raging for centuries and still do to this day, albeit with a little more material to try to answer it.
The short of it is: the conventional wisdom would be to define something alive as (1) performing some function, however trivial (i.e. transforming something into something else) and (2) being able to reproduce itself (from full sexual reproduction down to simple mitosis). The problem with that definition is that virii wouldn't count as being alive (they don't reproduce or perform anything without having invaded a host), and virii are usually considered the smallest thing that can be said alive.
If you extend the definition to encompass biological virii, you start defining computer ones as alive too. They, on the other hand, are usually considered "inert" (well, not alive).
etc etc...
So you see, it's not as easy as you might think... I invite you to do research on the subject before posting inflamatory comments.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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 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
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If you want to see some cool demonstration of ant behavior algorithm check this web site Eurobios
It's simple: A single ant is stupid. It's much more stupid than your average computer program. Yet ants achieve things which are all but stupid.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I find more inflammatory the claim itself that algorithms are alive, lacking a definition of "alive". The so-called inflammatory attack basically just pointed out that you cannot proclaim simultaneously that 1) "life is too complicated to define" and 2) "algorithms are alive because they make these pretty pictures".
And I say this having done research in Artificial Life (rightfully called the world's first and only fact-free science) and having thought about the question plenty. I personally believe in the thermodynamic and information theoretic theories of life, which puts me on the "algorithms are alive" side. It still pisses me off plenty to hear popular "science" articles in Wired spout off about it; it's the 60's AI fiasco all over again (except that today, the taboo you break by calling them bullshit is "thou shalt not attack optimism when hip self-referential concepts are involved" whereas before the taboo was probably "thou shalt not question your technocratic overlords; they are smarter than you).
1965: ``Pretty soon we'll have language translation out of the way, and then computers can do any and every intelligent task within a few years."
2000: ``Pretty soon machines will just self-organize to criticality and we won't have to worry about anything!"
Of course, it seems people aren't falling for the latter QUITE as much. Maybe it is a bitten-shy phenomenon; however I believe it is mostly because the latter is even more ridiculous.
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