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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.
Computer, where is Commander Data?
Lt. Commander Data is on the Hollodeck.
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.
"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?
Yo' mama so ugly, even robots try to hide from her!
You are refering to this story Where is Server 54 ?
:)
By the way, it was a Novell Netware server, not a unix.
pol
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
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.
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.