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

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.

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:What's that saying?

[fm6]

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

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...

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...

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.