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Household Emergent Behavior?

Posted by Cliff on from the silly-'intelligent'-household-devices dept.

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?"

3 of 359 comments (clear)

  1. I don't believe this by Tuna_Shooter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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. ---*
  2. Re:What's that saying? by fm6 · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

  3. eh... that's nothing by trix_e · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.