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Self-Repairing Spacecraft Uses Ant Logic
Elitist_Phoenix wrote to mention a New Scientist story about what could be the first steps towards a self-repairing spacecraft. From the article: "The team at CSIRO, Australia's national research organisation, is working with NASA on the project and has so far created a model skin made up of 192 separate cells. Behind each cell is an impact sensor and a processor equipped with algorithms that allow it to communicate only with its immediate neighbours. Just as ants secrete pheromones to help guide other ants to food, the CSIRO algorithms leave digital messages in cells around the system, indicating for instance the position of the boundary around a damaged region. The cell's processor can use this information to route data around the affected area."
Something you'd see on late night TV where they implant a spaceship with proprietary "ant-logic". The spaceship becomes sentient and runs straight into a planet in a vain attempt to lift it.
Kent Brockman: "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords".
You know...the one about Homer in space and the ant experiment they sent up got broken and there are ants floating around....guess you had to have seen it.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Everything sounds just fine until the damned things carry off your picnic lunch.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Finally we can have a system that tells us stuff like:
Rerouting through secondary coupling.
Bypassing damaged pathways.
Red alert! Red alert!
Diverting power around fused regulator 4A-CJ1.
The colony is under attack! Protect the Queen!
Which one's the Queen? I'm the Queen! No you're not!
Freedom, horrible horrible freedom!
The ants and space stuff kinda threw me off, but either way it's about time if you ask me.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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The big problem would be a micrometeoroid through the only on-board MP3 collection. Of course, since the cells are peer-to-peer, the collection will probably back itself up automatically anyway.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
...v'ger mode demanding all the Earth's sugar.
Because it wouldn't be as cool or expensive to develop. Duh.
Reminder: Apple owns 1/255th of the internet.
"Up and At'em, ATOM ANT!"
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Just don't call them Replicators.
In Soviet Russia, Nigel makes plans for you!
"Click, click, hum.
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
Hmmm.
A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it got was a hum.
The higher level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting.
The higher level supervising program considered this and didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted the higher level supervising program to the problem .
The higher level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn't find the look-up table .
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing.
Small modules of software -- agents -- surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
ant clean, repair
to fix their spacecraft. Ah well. This is cooler.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
This is how the Borg got started. Watch out, NASA.
Table-ized A.I.
NASA scientists charged for developing extensive peer-to-peer filesharing system disguised as "self repairing ant logic"
garble
The first alien that comes along with a giant magnifying glass and we're screwed.
The first launch application will be on the Nomad probe, targeted to collect sammples, sterilize and return to Earth for analysis.