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Day of the Robotic Tentacle
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist is reporting on a robotic tentacle developed thanks to funding from military agency DARPA. From the video it looks to have a lot of potential, I can almost feel it fastening around my ankle right now."
Think about the implications for the Sex industry!
DARPA: taking hentai in brave, new directions. Your tax dollars at work.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
don't tell Japan! think of the children!
As a Pastafarian I'm offended by this immitation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It's a blatant mockery of all I find sacred. I demand reparations!
Developers: We can use your help.
We couldn't have called it a "robotic elephant trunk", could we? Never mind that it more resembles an elephant's trunk than a tentacle, noooo. Never mind that TFA also mentioned that resemblance.
Oh no, we had to use the term that will cause 99.9987% of the posts to fixate upon the hentai aspects of this.
It's just a step toward the robotic cthulu.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Lots of anime' jokes already, but no Doc Ock references. How disappointing. Support American scifi in-jokes!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
So, you're saying that "Intelligent Design" may be better than "Evolution" after all?
(Yes, I had to go there)
Is that a Robotic tentacle or toothpase ?
...I smell a lawsuit coming...
I can almost feel it fastening around my ankle right now.
Ankle? You must read different comics than I do.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
... oh, you know the rest.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Must be some kind of fuzzy math you got there. Sorry to disprove you, but:
Robot Tentacle + Tentacle Pr0n = Tentacle (Robot + Pr0n)
Since we all know that Octopi have 8 tentacles, lets go ahead and substitute.
Robot Tentacle + Tentacle Pr0n = 8 (Robot + pr0n)
We can, of course, substitute I for Robot, leaving us with
8 (I + pr0n)
Since that's a capital I, we know it represents an integer, and not an imaginary number. Given that the Romans were into tentacle pr0n, we can assume that's a Roman numeral, and substitute accordingly.
8 (1 + pr0n)
Now, we all know the emoticon 8(1 represents an unhappy glasses-wearing person with a scruffy asymmetrical beard, or an unhappy nerd. So via substitution we have:
Tenticle Robot + Tenticle Pr0n = An unhappy nerd + pr0n
As we all know, this is a logical fallacy, since a nerd with pr0n is never unhappy.
I figured, if you were going to posit that ax + ay = axy, I might as well take the fuzzy math a little farther.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Schoolgirls all over Japan just felt an icy chill of fear whip through them.
Technoli
Actually, when I was back in college, genetic algorithms were the hot topic in one of our VLSI classes that year. What they did was apply the genetic algorthim process to a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip to solve a computation. An FPGA is sort of like a giant array of ANDs, ORs, and NOTs with a "control array" of flip-flops that allow you to control the routing of the inputs; you can just load in a new sequence and end up with different outputs using the same hardware. The genetic algorithm comes in by randomly generating the control array sequence. You then compare the output with the target output, then blend the successful solutions together until you have the final solution, all without any hardware design involved.
The story goes, some researchers did this to attempt to reproduce a non-linear equation, I think like a Fourier Transform. The plus side was, they were successfully able to demonstrate that the resultant chip configuration was able to provide the expected results. However, after analyzing the actually solution, the researchers found that the chip was actually creating resonance between different parts of the circuit in such a way that there was no direct path between the input and output signal.
The genetic algorithm had created an analog solution in digital hardware by incorporating the electromagnetic losses and field coupling of the FPGA wiring itself; if they had tried to tweak the "solution" by removing portions of the unused pieces of the FPGA circuit, or even using the same control sequence on a different FPGA, the "solution" would not work.