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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?"
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.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
when you vaccuum ver 2007 opens the front door for someone
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Just as long as my Hyperdyne Beer Retrieval Robot finds its way to my living room. I'll be ok.
Computer, where is Commander Data?
Lt. Commander Data is on the Hollodeck.
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.
Roomba: "No dissasemble!"
OK that sucked.
Never ascribe to intelligence what can be explained by mere randomness.
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. ---*
It's the sound of a thousand philosophers rolling their eyes in unison.
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.
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:
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?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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!"
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
"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*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
did you have to encourage the Roomba to come out of the closet?
But when the narrator's iPod, Cuisinart, LifeQuilt, and vacuum get together with his girlfriend, it all goes pear-shaped...
Da Blog
Yo' mama so ugly, even robots try to hide from her!
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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.