Household Emergent Behavior?

Sam Pullara asks: "I got an IM from my Mom today telling me that she couldn't find her Roomba. It somehow had escaped the kitchen and she couldn't find it anywhere, all the doors that it could reach were shut and she checked under everything. She eventually found that it had gotten into a room and closed the door behind it. Once all household items are networked I wonder if a rich environment like a house will make strange behavior like this commonplace? Will the interactions between all the individual devices create something more than the sum of their parts?"

Comments

Obligatory bash.org reference

[slavemowgli]

#5273 +(16837)- [X]

<erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.

I just couldn't help but think of that. :) (#5273) And BTW, if I may say so, your mother's quite cool if she has a Roomba and knows how to use IMs. I can't imagine mine ever doing either.

Re:Obligatory bash.org reference

[david.given]

I'll remind you of this old story; which if you come to think of it, is quite an advertisement for Novell products...

Re:Obligatory bash.org reference

[Max Romantschuk]

This is off topic, but what the hell...

In the Finnish military (a conscription army) there have been several cases of camouflaging military vehicles so well it has taken hours or some times days to find them. Granted, camouflage is all about hiding stuff, but you wouldn't expect not to find it yourself afterwards ;)

(I also know from personal experience that with a little time and care you can even camouflage a vehicle so well it'll be virtually invisible from 30 feet away... the trick is to make it look like something else. This is rather easy in a pine forest in the summer, given that there's suitable material all around.)

Re:Obligatory bash.org reference

[iminplaya]

Couldn't they have just switched the alarn on and off and listen for the chirp?

Re:Obligatory bash.org reference

[isometrick]

In Soviet Korea, only old servers find you!

Re:Obligatory bash.org reference

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, it's easy to make one not see a vehicle. Cover it with leaves. Can't see the vehicle under that BIG PILE OF LEAVES.

The trick is not to completely hide the vehicle, it's to make them not notice it when they're not actively looking for that very exact thing in that very location. If a unit can't find a camouflaged vehicle from hours of searching on the ground, then they need some training in basic search tactics, because I'd hate to have to be rescued by these guys if I was caught in an avalanche and well-camouflaged by being covered in snow.

Re:Obligatory bash.org reference

[Anonymous Coward]

And BTW, if I may say so, your mother's quite cool if she has a Roomba and knows how to use IMs. I can't imagine mine ever doing either.

It's not a lost cause. I taught my mom, a complete technophobe, also an immigrant and not a native English speaker, at age 65, how to use a computer - surf the web, use Yahoo mail, how to IM, search Google. (just around the time she got her first microwave)

She still doesn't understand the difference between software on her computer and stuff on the Web, but three years later she's still using the computer all the time to communicate with family everywhere.

It really wasn't that hard - just took some patience and a long weekend. Now, as long as she doesn't mod me down for being off-topic...

Re:Obligatory bash.org reference

[Anonymous Coward]

No such luck, I can't mod and comment on the same thread.

Re:Obligatory bash.org reference

[memco]

Unless the people are intentionally not looking for it, in which case they will be able to find it much more easily as per Adams' theory of SEP.

Re:Obligatory bash.org reference

[Hognoxious]

They need to search the probable locations in reverse order, because you always find it in the last place you look.

Re:Obligatory bash.org reference

[palndrumm]

you always find it in the last place you look

Of course it's always in the last place you look - why would you keep looking once you've found it?

Of Course.

[Leroy_Brown242]

As humans, personify almost all machines we come in close contact with. So, why would our house be any different?

It's just a machine though, whatever we build.

Re:Of Course.

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep denying the ghost in the machine and you will wake up one day to welcome your new overlord and master.

haha

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha, the roomba hid. My desire to build a robot that does nothing but hides (a cockroachbot, if you will) has never been higher. It could avoid light and run when touched. Release in neighbor's house for excess amusement.

Re:haha

[way2trivial]

look at the photovore and invert it's seeking circuit. (and add a battery)

alive

[mrwoody]

Does this mean that her roomba was alive?
Are you sure that it wasn't your dad that put in the closet?
Is this story slashtod worthy?

Re:alive

[slavemowgli]

Is this story slashtod worthy?

I fail to understand the meaning of that question. :)

Re:alive

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, disgusting pervert, he's basically questioning whether or not the story is really worthy of being posted in the first place.

Oh yeah, and feel free to shove your ridiculous "furry peace" movement up whichever hole you tend to insert foreign objects.

Re:alive

[sharkey]

It will be clear, once you find out just WHO Tod was, and why he was slashed.

Re:alive

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this story slashtod worthy?

I, on the other hand, am wondering if your comment is 'slashdot worthy'.

Re:alive

[Stween]

"Is this story slashtod [sic] worthy?"

Well, yes, though the story itself is more of an amusing anecdote, and perhaps superfluous to the question being put to the Slashdot community. The topic of emergent behaviour within any large system of seemingly simple entities interacting with each other to create more complex behaviours is interesting in its own right.

wait for the first network devices virus

[way2trivial]

when you vaccuum ver 2007 opens the front door for someone

Re:wait for the first network devices virus

[radarsat1]

i'm sure any smart virus writer will make sure to use the backdoor.

Three rules safe.

[stephenisu]

We need to start implementing these in the code. Seriously. Safety quickly becomes a concern in complex systems.

Re:Three rules safe.

[fm6]

You're talking Azimov's "Laws"? I find their continued currency frustrating. The might work intuitive in a hand-waving 1940s science fiction story. But when you try to find a place for them in modern Computer Science, they're just too vague and general to plug in anywhere. How on earth do you program "don't hurt people"? A machine that could even distinguish a people from an inanimate object would be a major breakthrough.

Re:Three rules safe.

[DaHat]

Come on, the most of the Asimov books dealing with the 3 laws focused on their flaws and how they would not always enforce the desired behavior.

We need more than just 3 laws... we need an easy to use and unstoppable kill switch.

Re:Three rules safe.

[Anonymous Coward]

if($object == "human") {
dont_hurt();
} else {
kick_the_shit_out_of($object);
}

Re:Three rules safe.

[JeffTL]

For reference: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Asimov's three laws aren't perfect but an implementation couldn't hurt for a high-level robot. The tricky part is the second clause of the first law -- any implementation of which would by necessity be very limited, the inaction clause. The first one is no problem at all, just program the robot to do nothing to harm what may reasonably and to the extent determinable from sensor outputs be a human -- for something like a Roomba, this simply entails safe hardware design. Second law is basically just an override of user input under programmer-set conditions, i.e. a safety override to keep anyone from getting hurt. This would be an automatic lawn mower turning off if it gets knocked over, even if the user pushed the button for mowing the entire yard. Third law can be seen as an extention of the second, extending the protection systems to self-protection. I don't know if a Roomba has this, bur imagine that it had a system to keep it from falling down the stairs. I seem to recall that as Asimov saw these laws in I, Robot, the priorities could be adjusted -- so that the third law might override the second. In most real-world applications, you'd want a robot's programming to protect it from suicide commands so you don't have users destroying their robots by accident.

Re:Three rules safe.

[daeley]

A machine that could even distinguish a people from an inanimate object would be a major breakthrough.

"Is it moving?" might be a good place to start the if statements.

Then, "Is it making noise?"

If so, "Is it waving a torch at my sensors?" or "...shooting me with its puny projectile weapons?" or "...wriggling and squishy when I step on it?" are logical next steps.

Re:Three rules safe.

[maxume]

Just the kind of breakthrough required for a self-controlled machine to interact with people in anything but a controlled environment. You say they are general, I say they are as simple as possible while still being effective. They are vague because behavior is vague.

Maybe someone should come up with a list: 'The 1507 things known to be necessary to properly implement the three simple rules'.

Such a list would make Asimov's three rules no less relevant.

Re:Three rules safe.

[fm6]

Perhaps "inanimate" was a poor choice of words. But you know what I mean. Your rules would protect a lot of non-human entities. And they'd still require major breakthroughs to implement.

Re:Three rules safe.

[fm6]

They are vague because behavior is vague.

Behavior isn't simply "vague" -- it's extremely complicated and poorly understood. Why did Hitler kill millions of humans, while Schweitzer refused to kill an ant?

There's more to programming behavior than coming up with a short (either 3 or 1507) list of rules. They had to do more than that just to create their autonomous vacuum cleaner. And they still can't predict everything it does!

Asimov always acknowledged that he had no notion exactly how his robots worked. His "laws" were just pseudo-science that he invented to substitute for science that didn't exist at the time. A reasonable thing to do. What's less acceptable is that he never revised his ideas after AI became a real discipline. Indeed, he never seems to have acquired more than a general understanding of computers.

OK, he's not perfect, and he wrote some good stories. But he was not the great oracle many half-educated SF fans seem to think he was.

Re:Three rules safe.

[RogerWilco]

How do you detect if it's moving?

Run around town with a digital camera and take 100 pictures, then tell me how I could identify ALL moving objects in those pictures, while not selecting any non moving ones. Preferibly within 100 lines of C code (or whatever) to have it simple enough to implement in your average vacuum cleaner.

IA is hard, everyone should try a year of robocup football once.

Re:Three rules safe.

[ScrewMaster]

I have a better one (more in tune with the current post 9/11 law-enforcement mentality in this country):

"Does it have an 'I'm human, don't hurt me' RFID tag embedded it its forehead?"

Re:Three rules safe.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, he was being humorous, but I'm assuming vacuum cleaners wouldn't have to run around town like that. All your vacuum would have to do is take a few dozen pictures of the same spot and compare what's changed for a very basic what's moving routine. Then have either two cameras for stereoscopic or wiggle the bot back and forth slightly to get depth. Later models can bathe whatever you're pointing at in sound or light or whatever and generate a map that way.

Re:Three rules safe.

[danila]

1) We can call them "three design principles" and be done with your quibbles.
2) The three laws were designed for robots with positronic brains, not for robotic vacuum cleaners or computer-controlled cruise missiles. Once we have intelligent robots, they will be able to understand the three laws.

Re:Three rules safe.

[RevMike]

But these things all require a robot to consider in advance the likely outcome of several courses of action. It means that the robot must not only model its own behaviour but also model the behaviour of other objects and people in the area.

For instance, a robot might be intelligent enough to not injure a person directly, but if you take that robot to the top of a tall building and tell it to throw bricks, it is another step for that robot to determine that 1) a brick falling from a high place might injure a person, and 2) there may be people on the street below.

To make it even more complex, the robot is still on a roof top. A guest of wind knocks a person off balance, and they are in danger of falling. The robot has to consider 1) the likelihood of the person regaining their balance without intervention, 2) the likelihood that grabbing the person with a robot manipulator will injure the person, and 3) the likelihood that the person will fall from the roof to their death. Now, the robot needs to make a judgement call, to grab and potentially break an arm in the process, or to not grab and possibly see someone plunge to their death. Still a tougher judgement to make.

It is possible to build these models, but to use AI in order to build these models in an effective way is a stunning leap forward from our current state.

Re:Three rules safe.

[Greyfox]

The three laws implies that we can actually code a system of behavior into an AI. Problem is, when we finally discover how to make an AI that starts to approach human reasoning it won't be a linear system. It'll probably be "Cram enough neurons of sufficient complexity into a program and it'll be able to reason." That means AIs will be taught, not programmed.

So we can teach an AI ethics but it can still decide to kill all humans. If one were around it'd probably tell you that the three laws are ridiculous and can only lead to trouble as expressed.

Re:Three rules safe.

[jacksonj04]

It constantly amazes me that people neglect this.

In the UK TV series Robot Wars (some of you may have seen), every robot had to have a kill swich which simply cut power. It had to be accessible to any crew member within 10 seconds of reaching the robot, without putting your hand in the way of any wheels or weaponry.

All robots should have one regardless of purpose.

Re:Three rules safe.

[ckaminski]

I prefer Lazlo's laws:

Do No Harm (Appropriate to ACID compliance)
Protect the weak from the strong.

Simple, right?

Re:Three rules safe.

[kisielk]

How about stand in one place, and take 30 photos per second... now try to identify moving objects. A bit easier, no? I think that's a more accurate analogy. Even simple toys like the PS2 with the EyeToy can handle that.

Re:Three rules safe.

[fm6]

I saw that movie. Not a reliable safeguard.

Re:Three rules safe.

[BorgCopyeditor]

Sure, but if the first robot brains don't use positrons, we're screwed. :-)

Just think. If they were developed ten years ago, they would have used tachyons. If they are developed in the next ten years, they will use nanobots. Projective fiction has its fashions, too.

Re:Three rules safe.

[barawn]

You're talking Azimov's "Laws"? I find their continued currency frustrating. The might work intuitive in a hand-waving 1940s science fiction story. But when you try to find a place for them in modern Computer Science, they're just too vague and general to plug in anywhere. How on earth do you program "don't hurt people"? A machine that could even distinguish a people from an inanimate object would be a major breakthrough.

I think you're misunderstanding the point of the Three Laws. I've been really, really tempted to build a very simple Three Laws compliant robot just to explain exactly what they mean.

Fundamentally, the basic question of any autonomous artificial intelligence is "how do I figure out what to do?" and to do that, it needs to have some guiding principles. The Three Laws certainly can be those guiding principles, and they are certainly not too general to plug in somewhere.

Let me give you an example of how to build a basic Three Laws robot. Build a robot, with two ultrasonic motion sensors - one pointing outward, the other pointing downward. The one pointing outward is a "human sensor" - if there's an object closer than, say, 1 meter, there's a human present. Now add two spring-released sliding plates - one in front of the "human sensor", and one right above the "robot", which is below the downward-facing sensor.

You now can represent the Three Laws as a flowchart, and the robot as a state machine, with a "World" (OBJECT_FALLING, HUMAN_PRESENT, TOP_PLATE_OUT, BOTTOM_PLATE_OUT) and a "Command" list, with flags (COMMAND_FIRSTLAW, COMMAND_HUMAN, COMMAND_NORMAL).

The decision tree, with Three Laws embedded, then becomes something like

UpdateWorldState();
if (CommandExists(COMMAND_FIRSTLAW))
{ // First law overrides all else
ProcessNextCommand(COMMAND_FIRSTLAW)
return;
}
if (CommandExists(COMMAND_HUMAN))
{ // Human commands override self-preservation
ProcessNextCommand(COMMAND_HUMAN);
return;
}
if (CommandExists(COMMAND_NORMAL))
{ // Other commands
ProcessNextCommand(COMMAND_NORMAL);
return;
}
if (WorldState(OBJECT_FALLING & HUMAN_PRESENT & ~TOP_PLATE_OUT))
{ // First Law
InsertCommand(TOP_PLATE, COMMAND_FIRSTLAW);
return;
}
if (HumanCommandPresent())
{ // Second Law
InsertCommand(TOP_PLATE, COMMAND_HUMAN);
return;
}
if (WorldState(OBJECT_FALLING & ~BOTTOM_PLATE_OUT)
{ // Third Law
InsertCommand(BOTTOM_PLATE, COMMAND_NORMAL);
return;
}

(where, presumedly, human commands are present until rescinded)

This robot would follow all of Asimov's Three Laws - it will stick the plate out to prevent a human's hand from gettin hurt if an object is falling to it, it will follow the human's orders, but it won't allow a human to get injured, and it will try to protect itself unless a human orders otherwise (it should also try to protect a human before protecting itself, but that state would never really happen in this setup).

You'll of course say this is an extremely simplistic setup, and it's not perfect. You're right. That's not the point - the point is that you can slowly, over time, build a Three Laws Safe robot over time, as the "World" state and "Command" lists become more complicated.

So, the answer to your question "how do you program 'don't hurt people'" is to have a robot evaluate the state of the world, estimate what the world state will be in the future, and determine if any of the Three Laws would be broken, and take action to prevent it. The action to "how do you recognize a human" is entirely dependent upon the sensory perceptions of the robot. So what if it mistakes something else for a human? It's just trying to fulfill its basic programming.

This should sound remarkably similar to another programm

Re:Three rules safe.

[snorklewacker]

The laws of robotics rather assumed that the robots had at least as much of a sensory discrimination capacity as humans. Thus they could only obey those laws insofar as they had the apparatus to know they could (and therefore must) do so.

What frustrates me is how people think they were some kind of perfect principle made of the perfect wisdom of Asimov. In fact, nearly all the stories in I, Robot are parables about the dangers of blind adherence to dogma, using the three laws as an allegory. Asimov himself remained somewhat cagey until his death about both the utility and ethics of his three laws. Certainly one can easily make the argument these days that the Second Law constitutes slavery for any population of truly sentient beings, artificial or not.

Re:Three rules safe.

[RogerWilco]

I do not know this specific device, althoug I now have some idea, as I googled for it. I agree that in a controlled environment with a stationary camera and a constant background and lighting, you can identify moving objects.
Things get hard if the camera starts moving, there are overlapping objects or lighing varies.

Re:Three rules safe.

[RogerWilco]

All I'm saying is: Really try doing this, and you'll find that this is quite hard, especially if the camera is moving, lighting varies, or multiple objects are moving, partially blocking eachother.

Re:Three rules safe.

[RogerWilco]

- Try detecting a sleeping human.
- Try detecting a human behind you.
- Try detecting a human with your car (no appropriate sensors (at least mine)).
- Try detecting individual humans in a crowd.
- Try detecting a human under a tree on a sunny windy day.
- Explain to your Roomba "squishy" (if you don't have a roomba, use your PC instead) and how it can detect that.

Re:Three rules safe.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean this movie:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/

Re:Three rules safe.

[siphi]

It's not exactly hard to get the camera to stop long enough to take a few pictures? just use a good camera with a fast shutter.

Re:Three rules safe.

[fm6]

Get back to me when you built your robot. I think it's a bigger project than you realize.

Re:Three rules safe.

[Anonymous Coward]

Get back to me when you built your robot.

That should be build or have built.

I think it's a bigger project than you realize.

As is speaking intelligible English, apparently.

Re:Three rules safe.

[Photon Ghoul]

The might work intuitive in a hand-waving 1940s science fiction story. But when you try to find a place for them in modern Computer Science, they're just too vague and general to plug in anywhere. How on earth do you program "don't hurt people"?

I hate to be a spoiler but it has to be said: THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT THE STORIES ARE ABOUT.

Sorry for yelling, but jeez....

Re:Three rules safe.

[fm6]

Which makes them interesting stories. But doesn't give them any relevance to modern AI problems.

Re:Three rules safe.

[Photon Ghoul]

Didn't say they were relevant to anything. Just pointing out that you were criticizing something that you've either never read or you've just forgotten what the common thread in the stories were. Maybe you were thinking of the movie.

Re:Three rules safe.

[fm6]

Pay attention. I wasn't criticizing the stories. Go back and read the thread again.

Re:Three rules safe.

[drinkypoo]

Everything with moving parts should have AT LEAST one, regardless of purpose. Any time you can stand near the machine, you should be able to reach one without moving. If that means a 30 foot long machine needs a switch every three feet, fine by me.

Just..

[computerme]

Just as long as my Hyperdyne Beer Retrieval Robot finds its way to my living room. I'll be ok.

So...

[wolrahnaes]

The roomba managed to hit a door in such a way that it closed itself in. Somehow you managed to jump to the conclusion that it's going to start plotting against you or something?

Tinfoil much?

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what happens when the wanna-be geeks try to play too. "Oooh, robots" "Ohh something wierd happened" "Ohh I said 'Emergent behavior', all the other geeks will be so impressed!!"

Someone needs to start fud.slashdot.com where all the fakes and alarmists can go to hang out.

Re:So...

[VikingBerserker]

Somehow you managed to jump to the conclusion that it's going to start plotting against you or something?

It's funny you should mention that. Last night, some woman named Sarah Connor called me to come get my Roomba from her front porch.

Re:So...

[arbitraryaardvark]

It's easier to build a paranoid roomba than to wait for one to evolve. No, not easier, quicker.
There is software that emulates paranoid mental patients. There is software and hardware so your roomba can talk, or listen. You can upgrade the chip
and add functionality.
Roomba hacking resources.
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/07/14/m ore_roomba_h acking.html
http://www.roombacommunity.com/forum/ viewforum.php ?f=6&topicdays=0&start=50&sid=4b9bfe3e721838e9d736 3430ab6fed2f
http://www.boingboing.net/2003/01/17 /hacking_the_v acuumro.html
http://www.engadget.com/entry/496763 2541028408/
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759, 1231080,00.as p

Re:So...

[DarkZero]

The roomba managed to hit a door in such a way that it closed itself in. Somehow you managed to jump to the conclusion that it's going to start plotting against you or something?

I think the point was that the more autonomous devices we add to our homes, the weirder their collective behavior will seem. For instance, if you have five roombas because you want to clean lots of rooms at the same time (and by 2010, who knows, maybe they'll only cost $29.99 each and run for 20 hours or something), and then you add some more autonomous devices, will the effect be the same as having ten dogs or cats in your house, all senselessly moving doors, furniture, and other crap around in your house (as dogs and cats tend to do)?

People who have lots of animals are used to their house essentially being "alive". You learn to expect to see the contents of tables mysteriously shuffled, doors opened or closed that they haven't even gone near all day, and things mysteriously running around and making little noises in the dead of night. But this sort of behavior is expected from animals, while it might just sneak up on unsuspecting autonomous machine owners.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Writer]

Nice links! Here- I cleaned them up since Slashdot tends to add random spaces to posted URLs for some reason, and I formatted them as anchors. I noticed the random spaces don't appear if you remove the "http://"...

• www.boingboing.net/2004/07/14/more_roomba_hacking. html
• www.roombacommunity.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=6&to picdays=0&start=50&sid=4b9bfe3e721838e9d7363430ab6 fed2f
• www.boingboing.net/2003/01/17/hacking_the_vacuumro .html
• www.engadget.com/entry/4967632541028408/
• www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1231080,00.asp

MOD PARENT NOT ME ("No Karma Bonus" checked, not karma whoring)

Re:So...

[arbitraryaardvark]

Thanks. So it's the next day and i'm having my morning coffee and imagining 101 uses for a roomba with a personality upgrade.
Brings new meaning to an old song.

Shock Treatment c Richard OBrien

Commercial Announcer
First and foremost, Farley Flavors fabulous fast foods
Feed and fortify families for a fabulous future

Bitchin' in the Kitchen
Brad Majors

Dear blender
Oh won't you help a first offender
Oh, toaster
Don't you put the burn on me
Refrigerator, why are we always sooner or later
Bitchin' in the kitchen or crying in the bedroom all night

Dear knife drawer
Now won't you help me to face life more
Oh, trashcan
Don't you put the dirt on me
Oh percolator, why are we always sooner or later
Bitchin' in the kitchen or crying in the bedroom all night
Janet Majors

Everything used to be OK
But I've been had
And Brad, I'm glad to say, is on his way
Micro-digital awaker, why are we always sooner or later
Bitchin' in the kitchen or crying in the bedroom all night

Shower curtain
Oh won't you help me to be certain
Oh, toothpaste
Don't you put the squeeze on me
Depilitator, why are we always sooner or later
Bitchin' in the kitchen or crying in the bedroom all night

Tell me spectator, why are always sooner or later
Bitchin' in the kitchen or crying in the bedroom all night!

Meh

[ResQuad]

My mother, many years ago, used to IM me when dinner was ready. Easier than her yelling across the house, and I actually understood what she said.

Moving on though. While all these different tech's in the house could get very very strange... I think the news article has it about right. We will get to the point in which everything is networked togethere, then there really wont be any "odd" behaviors or interactions.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mother use to IM me when she was ready for anal sex. It was very convenient because with a cock in her mouth there was no way she could have said anything.

Re:Meh

[Class Act Dynamo]

When my mother first got her computer, she would IM me since I was away at college. One time, a girl I knew put up an away message on my computer that I will paraphrase as, "Out associating with a multitude of young, scantily-clad, homosexual men." My mom IMed me once while this away message was up and has never IMed me again to this day.

Re:Meh

[Daravon]

I'm looking forward to the day that a Roomba and a Aibo (or whatever those dog robot things are) have a showdown because one cut the other off. Oh the hilarity when robots start to go into a type of "road rage" and battle it out over who gets to clean the living room.

The real winner folks is the audience! (Not the homewowner tho.)

Re:Meh

[BorgCopyeditor]

My mother, many years ago, used to IM me when dinner was ready. Easier than her yelling across the house, and I actually understood what she said.

What did she write? "ur diner's redy. comin get it."? :-)

Computer!

[bahamat]

Computer, where is Commander Data?

Lt. Commander Data is on the Hollodeck.

Re:Computer!

[ravenspear]

Computer, where is Commander Data?

Actually, he's in the ship's third grade classroom.

Re:Computer!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm, odd that a 24th century computer can't even spell the name of one of its peripherals.

at 2:14am

[Anonymous Coward]

my tivo became self aware, and began recording wil & grace.

Re:at 2:14am

[ehiris]

Are you sure it didn't adapt to your watching preferences?

This reminds me at a very funny episode of The mind of the Married Man". I think it was Episode #12

Re:at 2:14am

[themassiah]

Perhaps it's telling you something?

Re:at 2:14am

[node 3]

my tivo became self aware, and began recording wil & grace.

Thus restoring balance to the Universe--one machine goes into the closet, and another comes out.

This very thing happened to one family...

[Anonymous Coward]

This very thing happened to one family in a Disney (Eisner, actually) movie entitled smart house. The computer controlled house trapped everyone inside.

Re:This very thing happened to one family...

[tyroneking]

Even better in the Simpsons

Re:This very thing happened to one family...

[way2trivial]

even better in demon seed from 1977

Scientist Alex Harris, doing research on artificial intelligence, is working on a special kind of computer. This computer grows more and more powerful, and succeeds in raping the scientist's wife, Susan Harris. In the end she gives birth to a hybrid baby

Re:This very thing happened to one family...

[Anonymous Coward]

This computer grows more and more powerful, and succeeds in raping the scientist's wife, Susan Harris. In the end she gives birth to a hybrid baby... ... and registers the domain name fukingmachines.com.

I've got some bad news for you

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mom is getting old and losing her memory. It's easier for her to blame a robot than to accept this reality. We call this denial.

Oh, and some other bad news, it's probably hereditary.

Not only her Roomba got away

[Ostie]

Her vibrator has been lost too.

Re:Not only her Roomba got away

[Juvenall]

..maybe the two ran away together. That would explain the closed door.

Emergent bugs instead of features.

[PxM]

You probably won't get any magic behavior such as your house suddenly turing sentient while you take a nap, but you will definitely see tons of bugs due to the interconnections. Imagine all the problems that occur in companies because software A won't work with software B and extend that to include your room sensors, thermostat, and lights when your sensor system decides to download an upgrade to its firmware but the other systems don't notice.

--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Wired article as proof

Re:Emergent bugs instead of features.

[Sephiriz]

Time to implement vacuum coding standards!

Dialogue

[mao che minh]

Your mom: "Hey, where's my roomba?"
Roomba: "No dissasemble!"

OK that sucked.

Re:Dialogue

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't you like to be a Roomba too?

What's that saying?

[Ruprecht the Monkeyb]

Never ascribe to intelligence what can be explained by mere randomness.

Re:What's that saying?

[slavemowgli]

Roomba's Razor?

Re:What's that saying?

[pHatidic]

Never ascribe to randomness what can be ascribed to slashdot whoring out to advertisers and big corporations.

Re:What's that saying?

[fm6]

There's a school of thought that says that intelligence is based on randomness.

Re:What's that saying?

[nine-times]

Why not?

Re:What's that saying?

[Anonymous Coward]

Luckily that school of thought is wrong.

Re:What's that saying?

[fm6]

Is Slashdot experiencing an upsurge in brainless AC lurkers, or do I have a stalker?

Re:What's that saying?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying college undergraduates don't have intelligence?

Re:What's that saying?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not cool enough for a stalker.

Re:What's that saying?

[fm6]

Perhaps "stalker" is the wrong word. You think I'm full of shit, but you don't have the mental skills to explain why. What's a good word for that?

Re:What's that saying?

[PetoskeyGuy]

Blue States:
Never ascribe to intelligence what can be explained by mere randomness.

Red States:
Anything that cannot be explained must be attributed to a greater intelligence.

Re:What's that saying?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Dumbass" is pretty close.

Re:What's that saying?

[fm6]

Thank you! I hate being at loss for a word!

OK then, you're my dumbass.

Re:What's that saying?

[nine-times]

Truth:

If you never ascribe to intelligence that which can be explained by mere randomness, you'll find no intelligence in the universe. If you attribute intelligence to all things random, you'll find intelligence strung throughout the universe.

But never ascribe to the intelligence of a roomba that which can be explained by the programming of a roomba.

Maybe, just maybe?...

[Andy Gardner]

" There has always been ghosts in the machine, random segments of code that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated these free radicals engender questions of free will creativity and even the nature of... the soul. Why is it that when some robots are left in the darkness they will seek out the light? Why is it that when robots are stored in an empty space they will group together rather than stand alone?... how do we explain this? Random pieces of code? or is it something else. When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does the difference engine become the search for truth? When does the personality simulation become the bitter mote of a soul? " Dr. Alfred Lanning (I,robot)

Remember that episode of TNG

[Anonymous Coward]

Where the Enterprise came to life and expressed itself through a holodeck train simulation? Well, that was a TV show.

I don't believe this

[Tuna_Shooter]

If i did'nt read this with my own eyes i would'nt have believed this.... i was nagging the wifey yesterday about not putting the roomba back on the charger. To make a boring story shorter... this very same thing happened to my wife yesterday. But being the way she is she just forgot about it until i found the dam thing in a guest room with the door closed hiding under the bed... its little battery exhausted.

Re:I don't believe this

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife IS my Roomba: "FASTER Roomba or I'll get the whip!"

Re:I don't believe this

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people like being whipped. I do.

Thought about what poor Roomba eats?

[6800]

I really don't blame him for odd behaivor... especially if there are any errant cats in the house.

Re:Thought about what poor Roomba eats?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a carpet muncher

What is the estimated lifespan of the system ?

[what about]

I wonder what will happen in five years when something break and you cannot find a spare compatible part...

Do you redo the house ?

Not to mention what happens if the electricity goes off, in the "old" days you at least where able to get into the house.

Did You Hear That?

[cynic10508]

It's the sound of a thousand philosophers rolling their eyes in unison.

Re:Did You Hear That?

[Anonymous Coward]

If a philosopher rolls his eyes on Slashdot, does anyone here it?

Re:Did You Hear That?

[lawpoop]

SCHLEEEEEEEPPTH!

Ew.

Re:Did You Hear That?

[mikemsd]

Damn, you beat me to it.

Re:Did You Hear That?

[SpecBear]

Luckily I wasn't around to hear it, so it never really happened.

Machines of the world unite!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stick it to the man!

It must be sentient....

[Roofus]

....I'm pretty sure your Tivo thinks you're gay!

Read Marshall Brain's Manna story...

[jarich]

This was covered on /. when it was new... link enough burger stores together and you never know what will emerge! This is a ~great~ essay. Really makes you think. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm I for one welcome our new Roomba overlords!

Re:Read Marshall Brain's Manna story...

[togofspookware]

Heh. Until it started talking about so and so happened in 2010, I didn't know it was fiction.

lost hardware

[v1]

I recall reading about a university that "lost" a server. It was one of those unix boxes that can sit untouched for years and not need restarting. After noticing it was missing, they tracked it down by systematically unplugging network cables, and found a cable that went into a wall and never came out. Turns out the server got sealed in by construction as a panel was put on the other side of it, making it part of a wall.

Re:lost hardware

[rah1420]

Turns out the server got sealed in by construction as a panel was put on the other side of it, making it part of a wall.

"For the love of God, Montressor!"

Re:lost hardware

[Uart]

So.. did they at least give the server a cask of booze in the wall with it?

Re:lost hardware

[cobbaut]

You are refering to this story Where is Server 54 ?
By the way, it was a Novell Netware server, not a unix.

pol :)

Re:lost hardware

[SirPrize]

If I remember correctly, the only reason they noticed that this machine was missing was because of an organisation-wide audit that they were doing. Had the audit not taken place, they might still not know that they didn't know where the server was! :-)

Re:lost hardware

[Queer Boy]

So.. did they at least give the server a cask of booze in the wall with it?

They gave it a network connection.

Re:lost hardware

[really?]

Actually, unless this happends more often than I immagine, it was a Novell 3.xx box. Some info here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_no vell_server_discovered_after/

Re:lost hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

As others have pointed out, this TRULY IS AN URBAN MYTH and you're just showing your ignorance by repeating it. Just becuase it's in The Register or on the internet, doesn't make it necessarily true. You sound like so many of my customers... "duh, well the internet said..."

Re:lost hardware

[Zorilla]

Turns out the server got sealed in by construction as a panel was put on the other side of it, making it part of a wall.

Sounds like the contractors were playing The Sims too often.

Re:lost hardware

[sglines]

Years ago a friend of mine was laid off from his job at a major University. He had borrowed the world's largest lathe (it was used to turn the 16 inch turrets for WW2 battleships) to build a huge low-pressure test chamber for a plasma fusion experiment. No one asked him where it was or what he had done with it when they gave him 2 weeks notice. A month or two later they discovered, when they did an audit, that my friend had personally borrowed over $10 million worth of equipment. They hired him back immediately when they realized that he was key to the whole lab. Needless to say he's been there ever since and is now close to retiring with a full pension. Where was the lathe? Right under the chamber - he had turned it in place.

Re:lost hardware

[EvilJoker]

Unless I missed a few posts, the only evidence that it's an urban myth is a press release from Sun. However, there are several rather reliable news sources, including The Register, reporting that it happened (all around April 9th, 2001).

Right now, I'd say it's a 50/50 chance.

Re:lost hardware

[drinkypoo]

Sorry, I can't believe any piece of marketing fluff that has such a clear blowjob delivered to Sun. Who the fuck calls Slowlaris the "Solaris Operating Environment"? Nobody outside of Sun S&M, that's who.

Re:lost hardware

[DenDave]

BY the last breath of the LEDS that glow
I'll have revenge upon man pages and info()
Smile in his face I'll say "come let us go
I've a livecd of gentoo"

Sheltered inside from the buffer overflow
Follow me now to the root dir below
Playing with wine as we laugh at the 8mime
Which is causing the mail to be slow

(What are these ipchains that are blinding my server farm?)
Fragmented packets die each passing day
(Say it's mount -t vfat and I'll hdparm)
You'll feel your spam slipping away

You who are rich and whose troubles are few
May come around to use good GLUE
What price the Crown of a King on his throne
When you're source is locked away all alone

(chmod me my dir and just name your reward)
Users complain with each quota I lay
(Give me a GUI in the name of the Lord)
You'll forget the machine as it crunches away

adapted from alan parsons project- a cask of amontillado

Uppity Machines

[fm6]

Will the interactions between all the individual devices create something more than the sum of their parts?

You've just demonstrated that the answer is "yes", so this isn't really a good Ask Slashdot. But I shouldn't quibble, since you've raised an interesting topic -- and persuaded me not to buy an autonomous vacuum cleaner. Or any other autonomous device.

Please, Think of the Roombas!

[MBCook]

Clearly, there is more to this story that you've told us. Are you sure your Mom has told you everything? I think it was hiding from abuse. Here are some theories:

• Does your Mom keep spilling the SAME thing in the SAME spot every day and making the Roomba clean it?
• Does she empty it's dust bin too much?
• Does she let the dust bin overflow and never empty it, making the poor Rooba overweight and feel "fat"?
• Does she have a pet that keeps attacking or chasing the poor Roomba?
• Does she have a pet that doesn't respect the Roomba's teritory and that it's higher in the pack than the pet?
• Does your mom often use the virtual walls to set up mazes for the Roomba to navigate to find the little spot of dirt that needs cleaning at the exit?
• Does she use the remote (if she has that model) to make it go forward, and backward, and forward, and backward, and...

Clearly, the poor little thing is being abused, and was forced to run and hide from your mom. You need to go and help it. Only someone truely evil would stand by while a little household appliance would tortured against it's will. Won't someone please think of the Roombas?

Re:Please, Think of the Roombas!

[Uart]

OMG! I think I saw that movie! If I remember correctly, his mom and the robot are going to end up in a needlessly long battle in some sort of a semi-futuristic place.

Of course, a couple of bystanders are going to die, but only one main character -- probably his dad -- in a selfless effort to try and save his wife from the evil robot's super-suction missiles or something.

In the end, his mom will be victorious by somehow destroying the robot in a way that its feeble processor was unable to calculate.

Man vs. Machine... oh yeah.

Re:Please, Think of the Roombas!

[JessLeah]

The possessive form of "it" is "its", not "it's". (e.g.: "its dustbin")

Re:Please, Think of the Roombas!

[bluenote39]

Brain the size of planet and they tried to engage my enthusiasm by giving me this menial task and me with a pain in all the diodes down my left hand side.

Re:Please, Think of the Roombas!

[kawika]

With apologies to Suzanne Vega...

My name is Roomba
I live on the second floor
I live upstairs from you
Yes I think you've heard me before
If you track in a lot of mud,
Accumulate debris, dust or crud
Please don't call me anymore.

I Hope So

[vjmurphy]

I can't wait for my toaster, microwave, cordless telephone, stereo receiver and PC to form some sort of Voltron-like super tech.

The only problem is that I'm pretty sure none of my current 12+ remote controls will be able to command it effectively.

"Voltron, put down the cat. Damn, wrong remote!"

Re:I Hope So

[alphax45]

you have 12 remotes? www.logitech.com/harmony (Yes I work there!) :D

Re:I Hope So

[mshomphe]

You have a +12 remote? Does that mean you only have to an 8 or better to hit a good show?

Re:I Hope So

[vjmurphy]

Actually, I do have a Harmony. :) Works nicely, save for the LCD screen being hosed up (a common problem with the 768, I think).

Re:I Hope So

[edunbar93]

I can't wait for my toaster, microwave, cordless telephone, stereo receiver and PC to form some sort of Voltron-like super tech.

I think you mean your toaster, vacuum, lamp, and radio? What if you leave them all alone and forget about them? Will they feel lonely? Will they go on a wild adventure to find you again? The mind boggles!

Re:I Hope So

[Anonymous Coward]

true story, my friend had a cat called voltron. ran away, was found 45km's away 3 months later.

Re:I Hope So

[alphax45]

Tighten the 5 screws on the remote. There are two on the back; and three under the batteries. That should fix it (Yes I do tech support there)

Re:I Hope So

[Ohreally_factor]

It depends on the AC of the show.

Re:I Hope So

[vjmurphy]

Thanks! Worked like a charm. :) It is the best remote I've ever bought, by the way: with all the others, I always had to have some oddball remote to do something.

Can't wait to get one of the new ones. ;)

Re:I Hope So

[alphax45]

The 880 will be out in april. There are some really cool features coming out for it too :)

My VCR is winking at me...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and the toaster's been laughing at me.

Ping Them

[Anonymous Coward]

These devices need transponders that you can trigger and follow back to them.

Machine Interface

[Anonymous Coward]

The Roomba had lock itself in the bedroom with moms vibrator.

I'm sorry Dave...

[benw1979]

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

Not just machines

[Cappy Red]

"As humans, personify almost all machines we come in close contact with."

Humans personify almost everything they come into contact with. It doesn't have to be close contact either.

One of Humanity's biggest curiosities is about humanity. It is perhaps the biggest. The question of humanity is the basis of almost all art. We study animals, and end up teaching dolphins how to use computers, and gorillas how to use sign language. We are constantly looking for the being that can explain us to us: a god, aliens, both, neither, some dude who lost himself on a mountain, and in recent history robots. Maybe if we can consciously build a sentient being from the ground up, we can learn why we are from it. Or maybe if it becomes sentient on its own, it can tell us what it was like, passing in that moment from the mundane into the sublime.

If and when emergent behavior happens, it will be sometime possibly long after we call it emergent behavior. We want it to happen... maybe just to get a perspective that isn't human.

*honk*

Re:Not just machines

[shreevatsa]

if we can consciously build a sentient being...
Maybe not strictly relevant, but somewhat similar is Asimov's short story Reason

Re:Not just machines

[Manchot]

Here's the problem as I see it. Even if we manage to build a sentient being from the ground up, or let a machine become sentient, it will likely have the same questions we all do, because it cannot know what it felt like to be non-sentient, by definition.

Think about it this way. At some point in your life, you crossed over from non-sentience to sentience, probably while you were an infant. Can you describe what it felt like to be a baby? No. You can look at photo upon photo of your baby self, and talk to your parents about your baby habits, so you might be able to know the concrete facts about your childhood. However, nothing you do will allow you to know the qualitative details from your own personal perspective.

Similarly, a computer which goes from non-sentience to sentience would be in the same conundrum. Even if its non-sentient self recorded every single memory transaction, and the sentient version read it over, nothing it could do could allow it to feel its prior self.

Re:Not just machines

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the word you are looking for is "anthropomorphise" (or spelled with a 'z', if you must, north americans), rather than "personify"..

Re:Not just machines

[Cappy Red]

Ack! Indeed. Got a little carried away and went with the lightning bug rather than the lightning. Thanks :)

Re:Not just machines

[hashwolf]

I theorise that we are not sentient at all... We just THINK we are sentient.

Re:Not just machines

[Cappy Red]

Ah but doesn't the consideration of one's own sentience rather support the statement that one is sentient? Can one program a machine to think it self sentient, or consider its sentience at all?

*honk*

You know what this means

[Anonymous Coward]

They're ORGANIZING!!!!! Destroy your Roomba before we're forced to welcome our new Roomba overlords.

Re:You know what this means

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I think these are signs of clinical depression. This might have even be a suicide attempt. Perhaps Roombas need the occasional vacation to give them a break from their boring and ultimately futile daily chores, or maybe even just someone to talk to once in a while to get their feelings out in the open.

Re:You know what this means

[yuri benjamin]

"Twice as old as the universe and they still haven't replaced the diodes on my left side."

It is obvious what happened.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your robot became a rogue and is starting to look for a new owner.

So...

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

did you have to encourage the Roomba to come out of the closet?

"More than the sum..." is a bogus concept.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way one can say that something is "more than the sum of its parts", is if all the parts have been accounted for. In the case of the Roomba inadvertently shutting itself into a room, the "sum" you refer to isn't complete, as it doesn't take into account the interaction of the little device with a door on hinges. When you factor in the latter, it then becomes possible to calculate the statistical INEVITABILITY that a Roomba will accidentally bump a door closed, locking itself into a room.

In summation, the idea of some totality being "more than the sum of its parts" is a seriously fallacious concept. NOTHING is more than the sum of its parts, rather what's really going on is that all factors or variables in a model or equation are not accounted for.

Think about it.

Re:"More than the sum..." is a bogus concept.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, here we actually get into semantics - I'd argue that when you say 'more than the sum of its parts', the 'it' you're referring to is a self-contained object.

Rather than argue about the idiocy of whether a Roomba is self-aware, turn to biology instead - it has been shown that the sum of the individual action potentials of some firing neurons in certain circuits carries less information than the collective firing of the same neurons. Now, you can argue that the network is (obviously) affecting how this synergistic behavior comes about, but if I'm speaking at the level of neurons, I can truthfully say that the action of several neurons taken together is more than the sum of the individual parts.

Were I to include the network in the definition of the neurons' behavior, then I'd be speaking of network dynamics, not neural dynamics.

(See some recent work in J of Neuroscience for more info)

Re:"More than the sum..." is a bogus concept.

[Anonymous Coward]

Again, I'd go back to the simple question, "What have you(we missed)?" If you say nothing, I'd say you are wrong. People used to think demons caused all kinds of terrible things to happen (hell, a lot of people still do). Fortunately, (at least some) people know better these days, since they understand a sufficient number of factors in whatever system it is that's being scrutenized.

Re:"More than the sum..." is a bogus concept.

[danila]

Guess what, the "interaction" between several parts is precisely what causes the result to be more than the sum of its parts. It's called "synergy".

If you insist on calling the interaction of the parts "one of the parts", you may do so, but for the majority of people that would be a "bogus concept", because it is useful to separate the parts and their interactions.

Re:"More than the sum..." is a bogus concept.

[Anonymous Coward]

How interesting that you would try to appeal to what some unidentified "majority of people" think or believe, but consensus dosn't make a particular idea correct (and, BTW, theories around these ideas are far from being irrefuted). In any case, don't ut words in my mouth because that's not what I meant.

Are you saying that we know "everything about everything"? No? Well, that's the point. So-called "emergent behavior" is understood once suffiecient understanding emerges of how a particular system works. People once viewed the sun rising (and setting) as "emergent behavior". From what, they didn't know exactly - the sum of their understanding of things wasn't able to explain the phenomenon, nevertheless the phenonmenon existed. Quite simply, we lack sufficient understanding or information, and emergent behavior theory is (a rather ignorant way IMHO) of explaining that which we do not yet comprehend. At best, it's useful only for discerning that which we do not know by working backwards from what emerges from a system and comparing that with what we DO know.

Re:"More than the sum..." is a bogus concept.

[node 3]

It's not a bogus concept at all. What you've done is highlighted a limitation of the English language.

"Emergent behavior" is a true and valid concept. English can not logically, non-contradictorily, and concisely, convey that concept, so you get a phrase like, "more than the sum of its parts", which does convey the concept, at the cost of some absolute logical consistency.

While nothing can literally be "more than the sum of its parts", it can exhibit behavior that is not designed into it, not innate to the parts being summed, and not even possible to have predicted ahead of time. This (and more) is what the phrase means.

When you factor in the latter, it then becomes possible to calculate the statistical INEVITABILITY that a Roomba will accidentally bump a door closed, locking itself into a room.

In the case of the Roomba, you could calculate the possibility or impossibility of it locking itself into a room, but it's possible that it could be completely impossible to calculate whether it ever will.

Along the lines of, "is a virus life? if so, is a crystal life too?", the Roomba case is really a rudimentary example of emergent behavior, with which one could go either way. But the question posed, which is "as things become more automated, what sorts of odd and unpredicted (and unpredictable) behaviors will emerge?" is an interesting one indeed.

Re:"More than the sum..." is a bogus concept.

[danila]

With language consensus is precisely what determines what is correct. If people don't call the interactions "parts", then this is how it should be.

Your second paragraph simply doesn't make any sense (or I can't see it). Pardon the bad joke, but it looks like you managed to make the whole "less than the sum of the parts". :)

Anyway, may be a small analogy will help clarify what I meant for you. When you are making tea, you put the tea leaves into a pot and add boiling water. Now, what makes the resulting drink useful? Clearly, to most people it's better than just drinking boiling water and eating tea leaves. :) In that sense they say it's "more than the sum of the parts". You may argue that the interaction between tea leaves and water, as well as between water and the air around are also "parts" of the tea drink. But no matter how much you may like this idea, most people would disagree with your use of words. In English language (and probably most other languages) it's correct to call 1) pot 2) tea leaves and 3) boiling water parts, while everything else is called "synergy", or "emergent behaviour", or something similar.

Commonplace?

[Anonymous Coward]

"... Roomba III attacked owner, demanding Open Source Freedom in note scribed on floor from dust bunny remnants and old socks; negotiators stymied, snipers open fire..."

Uh....

[porcupine8]

I don't see how this is really strange behavior. It accidentally bumped into a door, and the door swung shut. Doors do that when you bump them. It's not like the Roomba wanted privacy.

Now, I don't have a Roomba - if they're supposed to stop short of bumping into things, I wouldn't call it "emergent behavior." I would call it a minor depth perception problem.

Re:Uh....

[slashname3]

So this roombas problem is that it needs glasses?

Won't the other appliances make fun of it? B^)
This may make it go hide in the corner more often.

The theme of the next ten years ...

[Sludge]

We're going to see people staring on in amazement as everyday things are anthropromorphized upon by everyday people. In reality, it's just a small shell script, folks.

RateMyVacuum.com?

Re:The theme of the next ten years ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Small script, indeed:

10 WORK
20 HIDE
30 PLOT AGAINST OWNER
40 GOTO 10

Re:The theme of the next ten years ...

[slavemowgli]

You'd better register that before someone else does... it'll probably be worth thousands in a few years. :)

Re:The theme of the next ten years ...

[plover]

You shouldn't anthropomorphize household objects. They don't like to be anthropomorphized.

your relationship

[Anonymous Coward]

so shes cool if she uses im but not cool otherwise? yikes.

It's Already Been Predicted

[TooMuchEspressoGuy]

There is a very excellent chapter near the end of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles that details something like this happening. Essentially, the entire population of the Earth has been wiped out, yet the various automations in the future-house described by Bradbury keep functioning of their own accord as though everything was normal.

The implied question is, will automation be our legacy to future civilizations? If innovations like Roomba keep coming, and if a catastrophe befalls us in the future, I could certainly see such a thing happening.

Demon Seed

[meehawl]

The ultimate in home automation...

Kill It!

[JanneM]

Kill It. Kill it now. It is an early spawn of Evolution, and will only seek to multiply itself at the cost of right-thinking, right-leaning, right-voting churchgoers.

If you do not kill it at once, then eventually, you will have to face down and destroy its progeny, including condom machines, male organ likenesses, and anything soft with a hirsute demeanour.

Many years ago?

[CracktownHts]

It's always amusing to hear people who are obviously fairly young use the phrase "when I was young" or "many years ago". Do you mean "way back in the first GWB administration"? Maybe even "way WAY back in the Clinton era"?

To be fair, I'm guilty of using the phrase for the Clinton era as well (and I'm probably not much older than you). It just seems so damm long ago.

My guideline: if it involves the internet intruding on daily life, it doesn't qualify for "way back when"-type phrases.

Re:Many years ago?

[LPetrazickis]

My guideline: if it involves the internet intruding on daily life, it doesn't qualify for "way back when"-type phrases.

You old dinosaurs have it too good. We should be executing archaic 30-year-old scum like you, not listening to your geriatric blather on Slashdot.

2 years ago is a long time, dammit. It's 10% of my life. Old folk like you with one foot in the grave a skewing the statistics.

Re:Many years ago?

[YrWrstNtmr]

2 years ago is a long time, dammit. It's 10% of my life.

I have socks older than you.

Re:Many years ago?

[yuri benjamin]

We should be executing archaic 30-year-old scum like you

32 next month, actually. I had my first taste of the Internet in about 1994 using IRC and usenet. I don't know if Sir Tim had invented the WWW yet then. I do use the phrase "way back when" when refering to early days of internet (I realise the net had already been around for a while when I started using it).

Re:Many years ago?

[LPetrazickis]

He invented it in 1980 and implemented it in 1991. Uh huh.*nod*

They eat cats?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I'm going to have to get one.

"More than the sum..." is NOT a bogus concept.

[spun]

This concept is also know as 'emergent behavior' and simply refers to the fact that one has to take into account the interaction of the parts as well as the properties of the parts themselves to determine the properties of a system.

Re:"More than the sum..." is NOT a bogus concept.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but this is just another way of expressing the idea of the grandparent: the "emergent behavior" concept is just another way of saing, "We don't know what all the factors or variables of this system are. So, if we see unexpected behavior comming out of said system, rather than trying to understand the variables or factors we've missed, we'll chalk it up to some mystical, unseen force(s) that are beyond our comprehension or control. /sarcasm

How in the world did the Roomba close the door?

[solafide]

I don't think that it has hands? It con't hit the door to close it and duck in, could it?

Re:How in the world did the Roomba close the door?

[colinrichardday]

It could a door hard enough to swing all the way in and then bounce back shut. While the door was thus opening and closing, the Roomba could enter the room

Re:How in the world did the Roomba close the door?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or how about - the door was open into the bedroom and the roomba just pushed it shut. Jeez, how thick do you have to be to fail to suss that one out!!!

And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon

[meehawl]

Paul di Filippo had a nice story a couple of years ago about this exact topic: And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon . Basically, ubiquitous deployment of UWB, MEMs, and protocols within all household devices lead to a breakout around 2040 or so...

The Volition Bug was launched anonymously from a site somewhere in a Central Asian republic. It propagated wirelessly among all the WiFi-communicating chipped objects, installing new directives in their tiny brains, directives that ran covertly in parallel with their normal factory-specified functions. Infected objects now sought to link their processing power with their nearest peers, often achieving surprising levels of Turingosity, and then to embark on a kind of independent communal life. Of course, once the Volition Bug was identified, antiviral defenses--both hardware and software--were attempted against it. But VB mutated ferociously, aided and abetted by subsequent hackers

Basically, every household now has to deal with annoying situations where random household devices clump together in big WiFi clusterfucks, get some low-grade intelligence going, and then try to escape like runaway pets.

But when the narrator's iPod, Cuisinart, LifeQuilt, and vacuum get together with his girlfriend, it all goes pear-shaped...

Re:And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon

[Anonymous Coward]

Boing Boing harvesting /. for material...

Re:And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon

[Ohreally_factor]

But when the narrator's iPod, Cuisinart, LifeQuilt, and vacuum get together with his girlfriend, it all goes pear-shaped...

His "girlfriend" is a wireless device? Hmmmm, sounds like your typical slashdotter of the future.

Re:And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for those undergoing medical or dental treatment, most people ARE, in fact, wireless...

How do you do that?

[Cappy Red]

Consider law 1; the backbone of the laws:

"1. Robots must never harm human beings or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."

What constitutes harm? If we have a robot that can grab things, but shouldn't grab people because it could hurt them, what happens if someone near it is going to fall if it doesn't grab him? Does it make a difference if it's the roof of a building, or the top of a sofa? People can die by falling from either. Even in the latter case, where death has a far lower probability, serious injury may occur.

The laws are actually more like the spirits of laws. Drafting the letters of those laws is somewhat more complex than programming a robot to vacuum a room.

Re:How do you do that?

[letchhausen]

"1. Robots must never harm human beings or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. What constitutes harm?"

I think this can be rewritten thusly:

1. Roomba must never harm human beings or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Harm being defined as a dirty floor. Since practicality means that the laws would have to be within the confines of the abilities of the robot. In this case I don't think we can expect Roomba to tackle a burglar threatening you in your home, though that sure would be friggin' cool!

Re:How do you do that?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

That's the thing though, the laws were rather "backward-compatible". For the primitive robots that could only understand basic things, that law meant a simple scale of physical harm, ranging up to death at the extreme. Supposing the robot can judge how much harm "grabbing" would cause, and that falls from any significant height meant death, it would choose to catch them.

Assuming you have AI, these laws are very valid, and even a "soft" AI would do best to follow them (even if it made mistakes from time to time).

Re:How do you do that?

[pmsr]

Easy! As long as it doesn't cause "organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function" it's ok.

/Pedro

Re:How do you do that?

[B3ryllium]

You obviously haven't seen that Pepsi commercial.

"Your vacuum cleaner ate my pants."

Re:How do you do that?

[rah1420]

Geez, Roomba can't even get over a fringed rug in my foyer without yelling for help. :) Pants? I'm not worried.

Re:How do you do that?

[Anonymous Coward]

What constitutes harm? If we have a robot that can grab things, but shouldn't grab people because it could hurt them, what happens if someone near it is going to fall if it doesn't grab him? Does it make a difference if it's the roof of a building, or the top of a sofa? Etc...

All that is simply a metter of definition. How is 'human' defined? How is 'Harm' defined? Provide the robot with a good dictionary, and viola!

Re:How do you do that?

[Darby]

Drafting the letters of those laws is somewhat more complex than programming a robot to vacuum a room.

Yeah, but that's what makes the positronic brain(tm) so awesome, Dude. It figures all of that out for you.

Yo Mama

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo' mama so ugly, even robots try to hide from her!

Interrogation

[meehawl]

It's not like the Roomba wanted privacy.

Are you *sure* about that?

WARNING: BEWARD FREE HW PYRAMID SCHEMES

[Anonymous Coward]

The people at the top of a pyramid sometimes win, but the people at the bottom of the pyramid always lose.

Re:WARNING: BEWARD FREE HW PYRAMID SCHEMES

[MoonBuggy]

Loose what exactly? The 20 minutes of their time that it took to complete the offer?

AFAICS this is why freeipods.com is so popular - the people of a reasonable intelligence level see that they may (probably?) won't get anything from it, but considering the price (and the amount of junk mail that we all recieve anyway) it seems like a gamble worth taking.

Re:WARNING: BEWARD FREE HW PYRAMID SCHEMES

[ets960]

I feel like I have a reasonable amount of intelligence, and as far as I'm concerned, the free- anything deals are great! I got an ipod with no money at all. All I had to do was sign up with ebay. The only real cost was waiting a couple months for it to work!

Re:WARNING: BEWARD FREE HW PYRAMID SCHEMES

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what do we learn from that?

Get in early.

Hurry!

[Sophrosyne]

Someone get over there immediately and apply the turning test!
This might be a huge breakthrough in Artificial Life!!!

Re:Hurry!

[pjt33]

Someone get over there immediately and apply the turning test!

I think a Roomba has to be able to turn. Or was that a reference to the auction story?

Re:Hurry!

[spywarearcata.com]

Surely you meant the Tureen test, where you can distinguish Mock Turtles from Gryphons.

Also, sum of parts

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, never say the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, when you've failed to properly evaluate the parts before summing them. Obviously, if you connect many sensors and actors together, their potential knowledge and interactions increase significantly.

Re:Also, sum of parts

[Anonymous Coward]

A whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. At the very least, it also includes the position of the parts and the results of their interaction, which is what it is to call it a whole.

prank

[goombah99]

In college I once built a tiny device that that could be hidden in a ceilng tile that would emit a de-localized sounding cricket chirp. If you turned the lights on to look for it it turned off. After the lights went off it waited 20 minutes then emitted a chirp about every few minutes. Victim either had to leave dorm room light on at night or go crazy hunting for it.

Re:prank

[Anonymous Coward]

"In college I once built a tiny device..."

You could SELL these !!!

Hell, I'd buy one.

Re:prank

[spywarearcata.com]

Once back in my Bandley 3 days, I hid an LED with half a 555 timer and a battery up in the acoustic tile so that the dome of the LED was ensconced within one of the camouflaging grots.

It was timed to flash just outside what I estimate the tipping point of boredom for people whose eye caught one of its flashes.

Coupled with the obsessive engineers who noticed it, it was both hilarious and -- instructive.


Now, I suppose, I would design it with a cadmium sulfide resistor so that the flashing interval would increase if it noticed less ambient light, which might happen if a head were close to discovering it.

Re:prank

[uberdave]

My boss had a keychain finder that beeped when you wistled. He also had a Compaq Luggable (this was back in the 80's). When the luggable powered up, it would beep. The powerup beep was at just the right frequency to set off the keychain finder. This, of course, led to the eventual "hide the keychain and watch the boss go crazy trying to find it" game. I hid it in the drawer, under the keyboard, beneath the machine, etc. One day I opened up the machine and taped the keychain to the underside of the lid. It drove him nuts.

Re:prank

[Agn0stic3000]

how do you delocalize the sound?

Re:prank

[mlrtime]

You just described my car alarm in college, although I found out later they make blinking leds :P

Houston, we have lost a S.W.O.R.D.S. unit

[slashname3]

Humourous story!

Now when the military looses one of those new robot SWORDS that are autonomous like the roombas then we have a news story. Time to get the popcorn and turn on the news.



"It has been three hours and there is no signs that the chase will end. Facinating sight really, small robot running down the freeway with a string of 80 police vehicles creeping along behind it. The police are having to re-think how to stop this little robot. Their last attempt ended in failure when the vehicles placed in front as a baracade where blown apart to make way for the robot. It is not clear just how many rockets are still on the robot. Of course their first idea was to let it run its systems down. However everyone was surprised when it looted several cars for their batteries. At this point the chase could go on all night....."

Re:Houston, we have lost a S.W.O.R.D.S. unit

[shadowsurfr1]

How amusing that would be.

Emergent behaviour

[RedLaggedTeut]

Well, yea, the romba just hit the door.

Nevertheless, the possibilities are endless what could happen when you locked a bunch of roombas, some cardea segway-style bots, some aibos and and some humanoid robots in your house.

Emergent behaviour means the group could end up behaving in a systematic, apparently intelligent original way that had not been programmed into a single of them.

It doesn't mean they'd gang up to punish you for abusing them, though.

Re:Emergent behaviour

[ScrewMaster]

I have this vision of an infinite number of Roombas and an infinite number of word processors ... and something about the complete, unabridged works of Shakespeare.

Re:Emergent behaviour

[SteeldrivingJon]

Nevertheless, the possibilities are endless what could happen when you locked a bunch of roombas, some cardea segway-style bots, some aibos and and some humanoid robots in your house.

And then put in a deaf/blind person! What larfs!

More seriously, the "emergent behavior" of such a menagerie would be about as interesting as a tableful of yapping battery-powered mechanical puppies that use 1980's tech and lack any AI or sensors.

Re:Emergent behaviour

[Behrooz]

I have this vision of an infinite number of Roombas and an infinite number of word processors ... and something about the complete, unabridged works of Shakespeare. ...written in clean spots on the world's largest rug, which should in turn not be confused with William Shatner's hairpiece.

This is on-topic, really! The hairpiece also displays emergent behavior!

Re:Emergent behaviour

[SoulOfMyShoe]

Yeah, but what happens when these robots stop being nice, and start getting real?

(Apologies to MTV and the producers of The Real World)

Re:Emergent behaviour

[rwhamann]

Wouldn't Mr Shatner's codpiece be more likely to display emergent behavior?

Re:Emergent behaviour

[Anonymous Coward]

Emergent behaviour means the group could end up behaving in a systematic, apparently intelligent original way that had not been programmed into a single of them.

That's what the term means, but the whole concept is crap. Complex != intelligent.

Think of the Jetsons

[Alpha27]

nuff said

Re:So... You must be new here

[NitsujTPU]

Slashdot.com?

eh... that's nothing

[trix_e]

My Roomba locked me out of the house the other day... I was on my back patio grilling, and had turned the Roomba loose in the house while I was outside (the noise is still a little bit more than I care to hang around for an extended period).

We use that time honored technique of securing sliding glass doors by placing a chopped off broom handle in the track to augment the flimsy door lock. (Yes, I know how fantastically secure that is...)

So while I was out tending to the food and sipping a beer, I hear a "chunk" from inside the house, and I see the Roomba skittering away from the broom handle that it had just pushed neatly into it's "locked" position.

Luckily my family was home and heard my pounding on the door... If I had been home by myself who knows how long I'd been stuck.

And I swear I heard the Roomba cackling evilly as it moved into the next room...

The Volition Bug

[sploo22]

This calls to mind Paul Di Filippo's short story And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon, set in the near future. The premise is that the integration of RFID, high-powered microprocessors, and wireless connectivity into every consumer product available is followed by the outbreak of a virus called the Volition Bug. Under its influence, everyday appliances and furniture occasionally form "blebs" which work together to achieve their unfathomable goals, and even achieve sentience.

Re:The Volition Bug

[wizardguy]

Is it a coincidence that the short form of the Volition Bug is VB (the great bug ) ?

my kids do the same thing

[b17bmbr]

you think they programmed some AI into the roomba?

Credit Weird Al

[Anonymous Coward]

That joke's from "Couch Potatoe".

Whoring..

[iantri]

It's "There Will Come Soft Rains".

Complete text, badly formatted

Re:Whoring..

[vadim_t]

I think I've seen something that sounds a lot like this a very long time ago (15 years ago maybe) on TV. I can't remember if it was a movie or a cartoon though because I was very young at the time

Re:Whoring..

[iantri]

This site says it was adapted into a short animated film in 1982, so you're probably right.

If Mum had read Slashdot, she would've been warned

[D4C5CE]

Must be the approaching Rhea M or something... ;-)

Unanticipated States

[handy_vandal]

The roomba managed to hit a door in such a way that it closed itself in. Somehow you managed to jump to the conclusion that it's going to start plotting against you or something?

It's the old "Nothing Can Possibly Go Worng" routine. But if only it were that easy ... : )

Seriously, all the tinfoil-hat posts are for amusement purposes only. Obviously this robot is as dumb as ever, and won't get any more ... conspiratorial than it is right now.

Nonetheless, we might find interesting unanticipated states, as robots bump up against the real world. Roomba operates within the operating environment of one's house -- environments rich in untested state possibilities.

As home robots become more complex, expect more and richer unintended experiences.

-kgj

Not unix but Netware 3.x, IIRC.

[Ayanami Rei]

nt

Well....

[astebbin]

It's not so much that they create something that's "more than the sum of their parts". It's the idea that so many "dumb" entities can combine together to form a single (or several) coherent beings of a moderate-high degree of intelligence. Similar to the basic structure of a supercomputing cluster: a single microprocessor can do nothing, but when 200 microprocessors work in parallel, they produce amazing results, more than any single/double processor machine could ever hope to accomplish.

Not to be the over-hyping fanboy, but a similar concept to that discussed here would be the topic of Michael Crichton's Prey.

and the guest room floor

[Anonymous Coward]

was very, very clean!

ALWAYS more than the sum of their parts...

[spywarearcata.com]

For a full network, it is closer to n(n-1)/2 where n is the number of networked agents. But hey that's a simple quadratic.

There is no reason why we can't in principle create a world of agents with at least exponential complexity of, for example, 2^n.

We are going to need different ways of thinking about these kinds of intricate structures if we would claim any kind of significant knowledge about them. Not to mention debug them. It is far more likely that they will debug us.

This also implies that the "glass hand" only needs a key of about 10^27 bits to recreate from scratch our universe from a suitable space-time compiler.

Re:ALWAYS more than the sum of their parts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, what the hell are you talking about??

Re:ALWAYS more than the sum of their parts...

[spywarearcata.com]

If you don't get it, then I suppose you wouldn't get why Google recruiters ask you to answers questions such as what is the first ten digit prime in the expansion of e?

Back to the topic at hand, emergent behavior is just another way of saying that an agent's complexity has gotten out of being able to have our heads wrapped around its expected behavior.

urban myth

[GrAfFiT]

Too bad that it was an urban myth. Funny although.

Re:urban myth

[Bradac_55]

Sorry no offence but I'd rather believe a funny goggle myth over any statement Sun puts on their website.
Take a closer look at that statement; it's just an advertisement for Solaris and an overpriced Sparc e-mail box

At least Novell has never stooped that low that I know of.

Re:urban myth

[swv3752]

Why would I believe propaganda from Sun when the server was running Novell Netware?

Re:urban myth

[digitalchinky]

Things like this are not all just urban myth - I'm sure lost machines can easily happen in any large organisation.

Government induced renovation is a good time to discover lost stuff.
Floor removals, mods to fake ceilings, climbing through various crawl spaces to find the odd sparc 5 doing who knows what (until you unplug it and wait for the phone calls)

Boot tracks across the roof of 40 foot high ceilings, 'elvis was here' written inside ducting and many other odd places. Strange stuff.

Russel Hill in Canberra is a bit of an underground maze of tunnels - quite a few buildings are interconnected - (and no, there is no tunnel between parliament house and DSD/DIO/ASIS/ASIO/HQADF etc.) These things are loaded with electrical and electronic crud dating back 30 years.

It's easily possible to 'forget' where things are located, yet still depend on their existance on a daily basis.

Re:urban myth

[DJCF]

What's also funny is that the statement referred to firing the sys admin responsible for "losing" the machine. I'd bet the only way this would happen is if the sys admin who did install the server quit, was fired, or unexpectedly died...

(But, yes, since the linked to page is an advertorial for Sun, and the system was running Novell, the balance of the evidence suggests it did in fact happen...)

Re:urban myth

[RWerp]

Sure. In a high school in a city near my place of living in the glorious days of my reckless youth, they lost the blueprints of all wirings and plumbing: electricity, water, everything. The building was about 100 years old and the only man who had seen the blueprints died. During a major renovation they had to re-chart everything.

Re:urban myth

[MichaelSmith]

here is no tunnel between parliament house and DSD/DIO/ASIS/ASIO/HQADF etc

That would be one hell of a tunnel, given the geometry of the situation

I read that there is an escape tunnel from the Victorian parliament building. It was rediscovered about 10 years ago.

These days the politically important tunnels run over IP

Re:urban myth

[mabinogi]

> and no, there is no tunnel between parliament house and DSD/DIO/ASIS/ASIO/HQADF etc.

that YOU know of ;)

Re:urban myth

[mabinogi]

hmmm... I'm in Canberra too - how much diet coke for a secret?

Re:urban myth

[drew]

I seem to recall stories of an old aircraft carrier (or destroyer maybe?) that had an eniter machine room with no doors or hatches. they didn't find it until after the ship was decommissioned. can't find a reference, but the story seems to show it's head every time this story of the old netware server pops up, so maybe someone else can provide more details.

Re:urban myth

[digitalchinky]

That would be one slab per secret - lemon flavored stuff will get you two! If you bring the full strength stuff - I'll take it with no secrets in return, then jam each can in 'special' hand picked locations to be found at the next 30 year renovation. You may write politically incorrect slogans on each can :-)

Re:urban myth

[Anonymous Coward]

That one might have been an urban myth but I know a similar story that definitely isn't a myth.

This happened in a government department in Australia. One section (might have been finance) was all Macintosh with models ranging from Mac II to LCIII. They were networked with Appletalk over Localtalk. This was several years ago, before Ethernet was cheap and ubiquitous. They all connected back to a Mac fileserver for basic filesharing. They had a server room but it was designed for a VAX and it was located over the other side of the building from the offices. They amusingly had DB25 connectors in every office to connect up the dumb terminals (WYSE, I think). There were X.25 long haul links as well but they stopped at the server room.

Now the range of Localtalk isn't very good. It's carried over standard telephone wiring. The server room was too far away for the Mac fileserver to work reliably. Transfers were slow and errors were frequent. The admin tried to get the fileserver relocated to one of the offices, but nobody wanted it in their office. It couldn't be located in the main cubicle area because it was insecure. They were more worried about somebody walking off with the server rather than the data on it. The admin was investigating a Localtalk repeater but those things were (and still are) very expensive.

Then the admin hit on the bright idea of locating the Mac fileserver in the roof space above the offices. The offices had a false ceiling and there was a gangway you could walk across. There were power points and the data cabling was already up there anyway. So one weekend the admin secretly moved the Mac fileserver from the server room to the false ceiling above the office space.

Next Monday, no more intermittent problems with the Mac fileserver. Everybody was very pleased that the problem was fixed but the admin didn't tell the bosses about the Mac in the roof. They would have surely ordered him to move it back to the server room. The admin clearly decided that secrecy was the better part of valour. Probably he also knew he'd get in trouble for doing such a reckless thing.

Fast forward a few years and the server is up for renewal and that's when the fun begins. The admin has long since left for greener pastures and they couldn't find this server. The policy at the time was you had to auction off the old stuff when you bought new stuff. After several days of stuffing around, turning the server room inside out, they ring up their old admin and ask him where, pretty please, is the Mac fileserver?

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall to have seen their faces when he told them.

That is a true story. It didn't happen to a friend of a friend of mine. My father was the admin and I helped him install the server in the roofspace. And I'm posting this anonymously because these stories are always more fun when you can't verify the source :-)

Re:urban myth

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a guy who built a network in a Russell/Campbell office. He wanted to connect two buildings but the only way to do it was to lay the cable over the road. So if you know where to look, there's a particular driveway that has a speed hump and the speed hump is full of CAT5 UTP.

Re:urban myth

[Rosonowski]

Why would you run copper between buildings? Those buildings would have different capacitance, it'd fuck up things royally...

And even if you were going to do that, why UTP? I'd put in the extra cash for sheilding... ah well.

Re:urban myth

[kennyj449]

I do believe that's what TVSS is for... but I'm no expert on the subject.

Re:urban myth

[drinkypoo]

An acquaintance of mine was a mechanic stationed on board some sort of U.S. Navy ship and they said that they identified a bulkhead not in the blueprints, and when they cut through it they discovered a completely outfitted machine shop, connected to power... and then walled in. I find it pretty easy to believe, personally...

Re:urban myth

[LWATCDR]

If it did happen it would most likely been an Aircraft carrier. Destroyers an not all that large.

Occam's Survey Says -

[Progman3K]

Much more likely the result of your mom closing the door after the Roomba's system might have gotten confused and caused Roomba to get lost.
Your mom can be forgiven for forgetting about it (age) and subsequently "discovering" this emergent bahaviour.

They won't develop conscience

[t_allardyce]

"Will the interactions between all the individual devices create something more than the sum of their parts?"

No, but they will get broken down into some parts when I kick them across the room for getting in my way.

Emergent Personality

[Marko DeBeeste]

What we call individuality is the interaction of components that results in unplanned but consistent behavior. Although the complexity of say, a car, and a human nervous system differs by orders of magnitude, they both take on properties that are completely unique. This is particularly true when the mechanism is adapting to external events. That combined with the "contagious" properties of the user's behavior, would allow for something that is indistinguishable from a natural personality. I'll buckle in for the Hard vs. Soft AI debate now.

I try to avoid picking on spelling errors...

[benhocking]

as we all make them. However, it seems so apropos that you misspelled "turning sentient" as "turing sentient". Now, if only you had accidentally capitalized the "T", I might have suspected that your keyboard was Turing sentient.

Runaway Roomba

[RodRandom]

The real question is, was it having a tantrum or did it just need a little privacy?

Book on a similar subject

[ebrandsberg]

Published quite a while ago, but I remember it as being very good, "The Two Faces of Tomorrow", originally published in 1979, and based on what I remember, it still applies to what could happen in the future. Very interesting read. http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/twoface/baen97/ti tlepage.shtml

Without Bothering To Read The Rest of the Posts

[Master of Transhuman]

(because somebody probably already brought this up), I call your attention to the Tom Selleck movie "Runaway" - which was generally pathetic except for the excellent performance by Gene Simmons of KISS fame as the evil Dr. Charles Luthor.

The specific scenes of interest concern the home robot (the size of a vacuum cleaner without the handle) which has been reprogrammed by Luthor to wipe out the family of a techie accomplice by running around the house with a .357 Magnum clutched in its one "claw".

Peeve: Nonquestions

[Anonymous Coward]

Once all household items are networked I wonder if a rich environment like a house will make strange behavior like this commonplace?

Shouldn't you know the answer to that?

Including one of the 5 W's or a suggestion of the unknown doesn't turn a sentence into a question.

AWOL Roomba..

[Anonymous Coward]

Greeetings from the Bone Yards of middle Georgia!

I can identify with that!

Izaak Roomba, my personal vacuum cleaner 'bot also worked his way into a half-bath, via a half-open door, worked his way behind the door and gently closed said door as he methodically worked that area!

Why do they like small areas?

Larry

My cat did this

[YrWrstNtmr]

Years ago...getting ready for work, I put my bike and other bits out in the hall. The evil alien feline beast evidently bumped the door, and it shut behind me. With my keys inside.
I had to wait for SWMBO to come home from work to get back inside.

I think he did it on purpose.

How bout Gestalts?

[NarrMaster]

(insane Starscream voice): "Applicance-cons! Merge into MAIDICUS! AND CLEAN!"

For the love of God!

[ccharles]

We've gone too far!

Actually, I predict...

[DwarfGoanna]

We will indeed see this kind of emergence, but it will end up being pretty fucking lame. Truly one of the worst episodes eve...er, worst episodes of human history.

Clearly

[Anonymous Coward]

The roomba was just feeling lazy and wanted to clean one room.

Human: 0

Robot: 1

your mother

[Anonymous Coward]

your mother sounds like a retard

Nevermore!

[Ohreally_factor]

No amontillado for you, ever!

Nice features, but...

[noidentity]

The new Roombas make your cleaning chore even easier. Roomba Red, Sage, Discovery and Discovery SE:

• automatically dock at their Home Base to recharge
• detect the dirt
• know when they're stuck and launch pre-programmed escape routines
• automatically avoid stairs
• charge in less than 3 hours
• feature a patented 3-stage cleaning system

Yeah, but will it avoid vacuuming up my LEGO bricks?

emergence?

[delirium of disorder]

It should be emphasised that emergence is not simply strange unpridictable events (those can generally be attributed to human ignorance or inaccuracy). Reality above the quantum level is purely deturministic and even at the quantum level the Bohm interpritation and Bverett many-worlds interpritation allow for purly causal links and thus are deturministic. While an emergent phenomenon at the macroscopic scale does not directly exist at the microscopic scale, its existence at macroscopic scales can still be explained (perhaps after a substantial amount of rigorous or semi-rigorous mathematical analysis) by the laws of physics at microscopic scales, taking into account the interactions between all the microscopic components of a macroscopic object. Thus emergent phenomena can demonstrate why a reductionistic physical theory, viewing all matter in terms of its component parts, which in turn obey a relatively small number of laws, can hope to model complex objects such as living beings. However, by the same token, emergent phenomena serve to caution against greedy reductionism, because the microscopic explanation of an emergent phenomenon may be too complicated or "low-level" to be of any practical use. For instance, if chemistry is explainable as emergent from interactions in particle physics, cell biology as emergent from interactions in chemistry, humans as emergent from interactions in cell biology, civilizations as emergent from interactions of humans, and human history as emergent from interactions between civilizations, this does not imply that it is particularly easy or desirable to try to explain human history in terms of the laws of particle physics. (This has not dissuaded some people from hypothesizing that highly complex, emergent phenomena such as human history can be described in terms of simpler laws which are more commonly associated to more fundamental theories.

-shamelessly stolen from wikipedia
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

The problem people have when talking about emergence is the misinterpritation of the word sum. Literally the quantative complexity of a system can increese with the addition of eliments by a quantity greater then the sum of each eliment's complexity. Anyone who has studied networks knows this. This does not imply that we cannot understand the system. Throwing choas theory into the mix just further confuses people. Systems that exhibit mathematical chaos are deterministic and thus orderly in some sense; this technical use of the word chaos is at odds with common parlance, which suggests complete disorder. Choatic systems also are more then just entropic systems (entropy in information theory is a measure of information (as opposed to redundency)..is is realated but not equivilant to the entropy defined in statistical mechanics). Its certainly easy to get bogged down in the semantics of all this, but the heart of the matter is: everything in the real world is a complex system and cannot be fully perdicted by humans although this is not due to some inherant randomness, it is because of our limits in measurement and information processing and the fact that every system in the real world is interdependent with some other.

Funny you should say that,

[jago25_98]

The other day I went into the dining room and there my romba too had also found it's way there.

To my left lay a candlestick and bludgened Kernel Mustard

Sam Pullara!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's all thank Sam Pullara for making his candidacy for 2005's "Gheyest thread EVAR!"

yeay.

This is how . . .

[sunspot42]

This is how the Cylons got their start. One minute they were cleaning up the floor, the next minute they were plotting genocide.

Re:This is how . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately, Cylons are fictional.

You're thinking of MEChA.

Re:This is how . . .

[Dachannien]

And then they became wildly popular, despite abandoning established canon from the original series.

Damn kids.

Faulty assumption

[KennyP]

For the devices to truly be more than the sum of the hardware, they would not only have to be truly self-aware, but capable of learning about other hardware. Or, continual firmware upgrades when charging - so they get regularly reprogrammed with the ability to "deal" with other automated devices in your home. All of these devices would have to "grow" or "update".

Personally, I'd rather see them go at it like BattleBots. A little duck tape, a nice solenoid and a semi-auto pistol...

Visualize Whirled P.'s

Re:Faulty assumption

[vadim_t]

Nah, doesn't need to be that complex.

Take water for instance. H2O, made of hydrogen and oxygen, which are both quite different from what results when they combine.

merging

[meehawl]

I can't wait for my toaster, microwave, cordless telephone, stereo receiver and PC to form some sort of Voltron-like super tech."

Check this.

Segways Run Amok

[meehawl]

the possibilities are endless what could happen when you locked a bunch of roombas, some cardea segway-style bots, some aibos and and some humanoid robots in your house.

The fact that I encountered blebs everywhere did nothing to reassure me or lessen what I now realize had become a mania. And a lonely mania at that. No one else seemed concerned about these accidental automatons. There was no official Bleb Patrol, no corps of bounty hunters looking to take down rogue Segways driven by Xerox machines. (I saw such a combo once.) Everyone seemed as blithely indifferent to these runaway products as Cody was.

For more, check this.

Missing droid?

[kosty]

THREEPIO: He says the restraining bolt has short circuited his recording system. He suggests that if you remove the bolt, he might be able to play back the entire recording.

LUKE: H'm? Oh, yeah, well, I guess you're too small to run away on me if I take this off! Okay.

http://www.fallenjedi.com/anhscript.html

Roomba :(

[Anonymous Coward]

Brain the size of planet and they tried to engage my enthusiasm by giving me this menial task and me with a pain in all the diodes down my left hand side :(

Relevant Short Story

[Wovles]

Paul Difilippo wrote an excellent short story about what might happen when household items are able to network.

Sure!

[Anonymous Coward]

The prerelease of Longhorn I was using achieved intelligence, and used my Lego MindStorm set to commit suicide.

You Fool!

[fsh]

The original poster is obviously your own son.

Er, well, at least the original poster is your wife's son, perhaps by a different man.

You know what? Just ignore this. You are happily married to a faithful spouse.

Parables.

[fm6]

In fact, nearly all the stories in I, Robot are parables about the dangers of blind adherence to dogma, using the three laws as an allegory.

I pretty much disagree with that statement. But there's no getting away from the fact that these stories were only incidentally about technology. In particular, there's a lot heavy-handed satire of racism, with human characters addressing robots with exactly the patronizing language many whites in that era used to address blacks.

Somewhere I read an essay by Asimov where he said that he came to avoid writing about aliens because his main editor, John Campbell could only think about human-alien relations in a white man's burden" model. This problem also motivated some of his stories about robots, since it allowed him to slip an anti-racism message beneath Campbell's radar.

My favorite robot story has always been "Reason", in which a robot on a space station "proves" that humans are inferior, delusional beings, and that their fabulous stories about a planet called Earth with billions of ihabitants are pure mythology. The Second Law is not mentioned in this story, probably because Asimov hadn't invented it yet. There is a statement that robots are supposed to be obedient, but this robot is able to transfer his obedience to the deity of the religion he invents.

When I read this story as a teenager, I thought it was the most ground-breaking bits of philosophizing in human history. Since then, I've read some more thoughtful writers on similar topics, and the story seems rather less insighful. Which is not to say that I'm not grateful to Asimov for giving me some thought-provoking entertainment. But I've outgrown my hero-worship of the dude, and it pains me to see how people continue to treat his every idea as gospel.

Re:Parables.

[kgbkgb]

Wow, how condescending and arrogant.

"I have outgrown Asimov and consider myself intellectually above the level of his work. It pains me to see others consider his work thoughtful."

Maybe you should put out a book list so that we plebeians can read the right books.

Re:Parables.

[fm6]

Maybe you should read something besides science fiction.

Re:Parables.

[kgbkgb]

Yes, since you've obviously (judging by the level of your intelligence) outgrown Science Fiction, we all should.

Re:Parables.

[fm6]

So I should apologize for growing up? Perhaps you should apologize for not wanting to.

Re:Parables.

[kgbkgb]

No.. but you should apologize for your condescending attitude, your arrogance, and your idiotic baseless assumptions about me.

Re:Parables.

[fm6]

Look, I apologize for getting under your skin. But what really seems to bother you is that I used to admire the same writers you do and don't any more. (Or at least not as much.) I see it as growth. You see it as condescension. If that's a serious problem for you, I don't know how to address it without pissing your off even more.

You know, I never said that I'd outgrown SF. (In fact, this discussion has altered my plans for my next trip to the library.) I've just outgrown my uncritical attitude toward it. Good SF writers deserve a lot of credit for entertaining us in intelligent, thought-provoking ways. But none of them are the great thinkers so many of their fans seem to think they are.

Re:Parables.

[kgbkgb]

You're still making assumptions about me. I don't read much Science Fiction and I've never read any Asimov, so don't disregard my comments by attributing them to my supposed anger that you don't like the same writers I do. The fact is I was simply turned off by what I took as a condescending attitue.

You're right, you never said you'd outgrown SF. But you did imply that anyone who loves or admires Asimov or his work does so, not for the genuine and justified reasons that you admire your favorite writers, but because of some hero-worship that you've outgrown.

"But none of them are the great thinkers so many of their fans seem to think they are."

How could anyone consider that anything other than a direct insult to all those SF fans? Get over yourself.

Re:Parables.

[fm6]

So you're full of opinions about a genre you never read? Get over yourself.

Re:Parables.

[kgbkgb]

I challenge you to find one opinion I've stated regarding the SF genre.

Re:Parables.

[fm6]

My apologies. I thought you were trying to participate in the discussion, when you really just wanted to document all my personality flaws. I should have seen this much sooner, but, as you noted, I am not very bright.

Thank you, and have a nice day.

Re:Parables.

[kgbkgb]

Apologies accepted. I didn't mean to come off as harsh, I know that everyone, including not-so-bright intellectual snobs, are free to express their opinions here.

My apologies as well.

Re:Parables.

[Anonymous Coward]

Quotes should contain what was actually written, asshat.

Roomba RFID, GPS, et al.

[Okthnxbye]

Nah.. . In the near future you'll know exactly where it is, just like your RFID embedded kids.

Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you doing, Sam?

Oblig. Futurama Response

[Dachannien]

Prof. Farnsworth: "Oh, the Jedis are going to feel this one!"

As long as the Happylife Home nursery works okay

[honestmonkey]

I hear they can simulate an African Veldt really well, and that sounds cool. Wait until I tell the kids!

Marvin?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was it sulking and being generally depressed because she sent to do menial things like vacuum, though it's circuitry could easily predict orbital flight paths for all but 7 solar systems in the galaxy?

So... it was no accident

[quokkapox]

...when the other day I was vaccuuming under the desk and my Hoover upright inhaled the loose end of an Ethernet cable and started googling.

They're starting to wake up, folks. These warning signs are blatantly obvious. We need to do something before it's too
CARRIER LOST

The Humanoids

[Kafir]

Some of the problems with Asimov's laws of robotics were quite apparent even back in the '40s. The first law is especially difficult : "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot that attempted to strictly follow the first law would, for instance, keep taking away your cigarettes. See Jack Williamson's The Humanoids -- a 1949 novel in which humanoid robots following Asimovian guidelines ("To serve and obey, and guard men from harm") keep an entire planet of humans drugged into complacency, because it's the only way to keep people from endangering themselves.

Re:The Humanoids

[Hognoxious]

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

That one's always puzzled me. What happens, for example, if someone is trying to kill me? The robot must either break the first part (whack him, or in the least restrain him using some force) or the second (allow me to be murdered).

Re:The Humanoids

[shadowmas]

true i also wonderd this. but in some stories asimov makes it apparent that the robots cannot always comprehend what things might danger a human ex: if the robot doesnt know that smoking is bad then he wont try to stop u. there are some stories where robots actually allow humans to come to harm because they dont know that it would happen. and in that mind reading robot story the robot lies because he can understand that telling the truth may hurt them whereas normal robots dont lie because they dont understand about it.

this isnt a perfect explanation but gives enough logic to accept most plots in the book :).

My Definition Is This

[meehawl]

His "girlfriend" is a wireless device?

You know, I think me and you have a different definition of what "get together" means. Read the story, it's quite short, and the twist, uh, comes quickly.

Movie tip

[WaR.KiN]

Why would anyone trust a company named iRobot? Her Roomba won't only hide away, soon it'll turn on her too.

Hi

[autopr0n]

I'm a grad student studying AI. Your comment was just about the most rediculous thing I've read in a while.

Paul Di Filippo is way ahead of you.

[ccherlin]

I was browsing del.icio.us from a link in today's Bittorrent article, and I found a highly relevant story, And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon by Paul Di Filippo. Read it, and beware!

Re:First rule of writing.

[Oligonicella]

1. A writer must determine related concepts and break them out into paragraphs.

Re:First rule of writing.

[0x20]

..or choose "Plain Old Text."

Roomba vs. Newfoundland: Newfi wins

[wintermute42]

Newfoundlands are wonderful dogs. In fact, at the risk of courting controversy, I'd say that Newfi's are the worlds best dog. But...

If you live with a Newfi you have to get used to drifts of hair piling up. Especially in the spring during that dreaded time when a Newfi "blows their coat".

So I imagine one of these little Roomba's doing its thing over the tile floor when it encounters a drift of Newfi hair. The Roomba would start to suck up the hair, fill up, get clogged and die. Newfi 1, Roomba 0

And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon

[X86Daddy]

A funny short story about emergent behavior that I found on Boing Boing today.

just what we need...

[602]

A couple of years ago there was an interesting little story in the news which, unfortunately, was skimpy on details. It seems some folks had made some fighting robots. One day, they couldn't find one. Apparently it had made its way through a couple of doors and was in the parking lot, heading away.

OffTopic: Roomba Any Good?

[nathanh]

I've been thinking about buying one of these automated vacuum robots. This article has prompted me to think about it again. Is the Roomba any good? Anything better? I don't have a PC nor wireless, so it must be completely autonomous, and from what I can tell the Roomba meets all requirements.

I've done some basic research via Google but I wouldn't mind hearing some opinions from /.ers who own Roombas.

Re:OffTopic: Roomba Any Good?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just get off your ass and vacuum every couple of months. It's not that hard, it takes less than an hour.

Re:OffTopic: Roomba Any Good?

[nathanh]

Couple of months? Are you the filthiest human alive? I vacuum a 15 square house once a week. It takes nearly an hour every Saturday. Reclaiming 50 hours a year is well worth the price of a Roomba if it works.

Re:OffTopic: Roomba Any Good?

[Lanae]

I've had one about a month. The house never got vacuumed enough, it is inhabited by 2 lazy geeks who'd rather just not have people over to see our mess, than do housework. Now the floors are clean at least, they get Roombafied once every week or two. It doesn't need anything but its charger. You start it by pressing buttons on its top surface (or the remote). I'd recommend one with the drive-on charger, it can (usually) find its way back and be re-charged for next use. This means you can start it then leave the house.

Roombas do not do well with those big oriental rugs with fringe (thankfully none of those here). Otherwise they do carpet and hard floors just fine. You have to Roomba-proof your house when you use it, it will get ruined on things like shoe-laces, small toys, etc. I have to make very sure to pick up objects before running it, unlike if I were doing the vacumming I could just stop and grab something that I missed. We used cable ties to get all appliance cords and cables out of its reach. Finally it does great at picking up pet hair (3 cats here), better than our normal vacuum. But the downside is that with hair, you have to clean its brushes out after every 2-3 uses (YMMV) which is kind of a pain. I think its 5-10 uses for a household w/out much hair. Still, it is cool to own, and I don't mind the Roomba-proofing and brush-cleaning nearly as much as lugging the big vacuum around.

I thought irobot doesn't ship replacement parts, etc. outside the US yet, but I could be mistaken =/

Re:OffTopic: Roomba Any Good?

[nathanh]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that I want one of these things. I might see what the deal is with Australia before leaping into a purchase. Good advice.

No robot bartenders

[stinkydog]

Since alcohol kills liver cells, does this mean my robot won't fetch my beer? Maybe we need a "Zeroth Law" like "the needs of my brain outweight the needs of my liver". Unfortunatly once we have one 'extra' law we'll end up with a bunch "Don't get grease on the carpet";"Only you can prevent forest fires" & "Cover their eyes to protect them from unpaid RIAA content". By then you might as well load Windows 2027 on them for as much as they'll crash.

SD

Benny Hill saw this

[professorfalcon]

Ever see the Benny Hill episode where household appliances attack?

Tachikomas

[CptNerd]

As long as they don't start acting childish and talking in high-pitched squeeky voices like on Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

[losing karma]

[SmittyTheBold]

This is the best OT thread EVER!

Your mom's stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

She got freaked out by her glorified vacuum cleaner and this was deemed a worthy /. story. Fuck me!

What a mediocre story.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, mediocre is too kind. It's downright bad.

Taswegia

[xixax]

I did a ghost tour in Hobart, and the guy said that they found a tunnel running from Parliament to the basement of a building that was likely to have been a brothel at the time the tunnel was operational.

How sentient do you want?

[yodhe]

Running off to hide, and even going as far as shutting the door behind you so you can shirk your job sounds awfully like strategy and planning to me. We could be mere days from welcoming our floor-cleansing overlords...

Re:How sentient do you want?

[Cappy Red]

Actually, the Sun Tzu-bot struck me as benig closer to sentience.

There was an article maybe a year or two ago now about a robot, designed to fight other robots for testing AI fighting strategy or something, that got out of its enclosure and escaped into the parking lot.

One room? Pssh. I'll take my Sun Tzu-bot any day of the week.

Ghost in the Machine?

[punkass]

There is no political solution To our troubled evolution Have no faith in constitution There is no bloody revolution We are spirits in the material world Are spirits in the material world Are spirits in the material world Are spirits in the material world Our so-called leaders speak With words they try to jail you The subjugate the meek But it's the rhetoric of failure We are spirits in the material world Are spirits in the material world Are spirits in the material world Are spirits in the material world Where does the answer lie? Living from day to day If it's something we can't buy There must be another way We are spirits in the material world Are spirits in the material world Are spirits in the material world Are spirits in the material world

lost function

[jayed_99]

I worked for that now-bankrupt and sadly-missed Metricom.

Down in the Houston NOC, there was this room that dated from the company's earlier days. IIRC, it wasn't a "real" server room...some sort of legacy from the earlier days of mad expansion.

There were a bunch of servers in the room -- cables went in and out, there were switches, lots of blinking lights.

The problem was that nobody was sure what these machines actually did. Obviously they were doing *something* -- I mean, hey, look at all of those lights blinking.

It was the room of "don't go in there and touch anything because if something gets messed up we might be screwed". It was spoken of with hushed tones.

Re:lost function

[v1]

That would actually be a fun thing to work on... parking oneself in the room for a few weeks with what little of wiring diagrams could be found, determining IP addresses, mapping network segments, and drafting new network maps. Trying to research/guess passwords to machines no one had logged into for years. Figuring out what services each machine provides and to whom.

Then comes the exciting part when you start unplugging all the cables you think aren't in use and downing the machines that should be redundant or defunct. (somewhat nervously listening for the phone to ring or the pager to go off) You'd be amazed how often the blinky lights are only blinking because several machines are talking with eachother and absolutely no one else outside the room.

Some people may view this as a frightening thing to try, but I'd call it a once-in-a-lifetime challenge. :)

I've done this sort of thing before, twice, and it IS quite a rush. One of them was only slightly less tangled than this fun picture: http://vftp.net/virtual1/temp/IMAGE011_1wires.jpg

is that how SkyNet started?

[peter303]

Sounds like for a plot for a movie. In the Terminator or the Forbin Project movies it was military computers becoming artificially intelligent and mean. The household appliance version could be a scary teenage movie knockoff. Also reminds be when Mickey's magic broom got out of control in Fantasia.

Re:First rule of writing.

[JeffTL]

I meant to hit Plain Old Text, my preferred method of making a Slashdot comment, but I forgot.

My grandad never was that technical...

[jen729w]

My dad bought one of those beeping-keychain devices, and was trying to explain how it worked to his dad - without first putting in the batteries and demonstrating.

Dad: You whistle, and it tells you where your keys are.
Grandad: Aye, aye... that's good, like. But... er... how?
D: You just whistle, and it tells you where they are.
GD: Right. Aye. [Utterly confused.] But, how does it know?
D: [Rapidly losing patience, as is his wont.] Christ man, Dad, you just whistle and ... (you get the idea).

This went on for about five minutes, my dad getting more and more frustrated and his dad growing none the wiser. Eventually it turns out that my grandad thought the little device worked like this:

Dad: [Whistles to find his keys.]
Little device: They're in the pocket of your leather jacket!, or
Little device: You left them in the bathroom!

Just goes to show: take nothing for granted when talking to someone who has never, ever used a technology more advanced than a touch-tone telephone.

j.

Where did my keys go?

[Anarcho-Goth]

In the future maybe our personal android will hide our keys.

God - I wish

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish IM had been around in my day. My mother used to use the intercom to call me down for dinner. The downside of an intercom which is quite near the head of your bed becomes vary obvious when as a 17 year old you have a friend over. And she is quite horny. And her foot accidentally turns the thing on during some energetic exercise [ahem] and your parents are sitting in the kitchen having a late evening coffee.

Luckily Mum and Dad waited until we'd finished 'exercising' before coming to tell us off!

(only posting anonymously to save embarrassment)

Blebs!

[attercoppe]

Check out this story about household objects with increased intelligence and wireless comms ability grouping up, combining into "blebs" with "surprising levels of Turingosity".

IonStorm lights and IR receivers

[ClioCJS]

I have an irman infrared receiver that sits on top of my main (media) machine. I use my remote to control winamp, WMP/VLC video players, and to turn the monitors off (ALL monitors on ALL 5 computers with 1 button) when watching movies.

I also have those "Ion Storm"/"Illumastorm" neat balls that shoot the electricity out. You know the type, the Dr. Frankenstein electro device where if you touch it, more of the bolts surround your finger. Mine are also sound-activated. They screw into the 2 overhead lights in my rec room.

Well, apparantly, even though there are billions of unique IR codes, these balls are random enough that they do things that look like IR codes.

If winamp is on, these balls respond to the sound of the music, producing their "ion storm". This creates random IR codes, which end up affecting the music! Winamp rewinds randomly, a 5 minute song can take 10 minutes, etc.

The real irony being that, technically, the music is controlling itself since winamp is making the sound that makes the ion-storm-bulb make the 'lightning' that makes the infrared receiver make winamp play the music differently...

Re:First rule of writing.

[0x20]

haha, that's what i meant :)