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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?"
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.
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
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.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
There's a school of thought that says that intelligence is based on randomness.
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.
But when the narrator's iPod, Cuisinart, LifeQuilt, and vacuum get together with his girlfriend, it all goes pear-shaped...
Da Blog
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.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
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.
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.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
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...
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
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.
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