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SwarmOS Demonstrated at Idea Festival
PacoCheezdom writes "Intelligent Life has short summary of a demonstration by MIT professor James McLurkin of his new group-minded robots, which run an operating system called 'Swarm OS'. The robots are able to work together as a group not by communicating with all members of the group at once, but by talking only to their neighbors, and model other similar behaviors performed by bees and ants. "
I, for one, welcome the new swarming overlords nearest to me, so that they might welcome the rest.
@AlexSheive
Slashdotted already
I worked in robotics for 3 years and there was a big fad of cooperative robotics. Now, closely related is this swarm stuff. But theoretically it is the same as having a robot with many parts (i.e. higher dimensional phase space). I never saw any real applications.
I, for one, welcome the new swarming overlords nearest to me, so that they might welcome the rest.
:)
Gee, thanks! And I, for one, welcome the swarming overlords below my post. (Pass it on, guys! Let's see how large this chain can get!
Looks like the host got...swarmed!
Tried to RTFA and got this instead:
.html documents instead of painful .php scripts will practically eliminate CPU usage."
"This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota
Please contact this site's webmaster.
Wait a few minutes and use your browser's "Back" button or click here to try again.
If you are the webmaster, your account may have gotten this error for one or more of the following reasons:
* Your account has used more than its share of the cpu in the past 60 second sliding window.
* Your account has too many concurrent processes running simultanously.
* Your account has consumed too much memory.
* Your site was recently very busy trying to run inefficient scripts.
The solution would be to optimize your applications to use less CPU.
Adding appropriate indeces to your SQL tables can often help reduce CPU.
Using static
If anyone has a working link, please share. I was actually interested in *GASP!* reading the article.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
You can read more about this research and see some videos of the robots in action here.
What would really be a practical application of this? Name me one.
The game.
Thank you for the welcome! I, for one, welcome the swarming robotic overlord bits below me. Hopefully we can figure out how to build a petrified, robotic Natalie Portman and cover her in naked robotic grits. (Is this possible, considering we can only talk to our neighbors?)
Legalize it.
I, for one, welcome our new robotic ant-like overlord swarm. However, I would like to remind them that as a relative unknown, I will be mostly useless rounding up others to toil in their underground robot sugar caves. I can play a good supportive role with words of encouragement. Go RobotAnts Go!
I saw Mr. McLurkin give his presentation here in Ottawa. Fascinating stuff. Each component of the swarm is very dumb, with very little storage. If you want to store a location for future reference, it's very easy; park a robot there.
All the robots have a sound system, though; the first thing Mr. McLurkin did during his presentation was to have a single robot request that 6 other robots follow it, and the swarm picked and allocated 6 robots, and they all went off in a chain, singing "Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work we go".
Check out James McLurkin's website for some presentations and videos:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/jamesm/
...of an obligatorily /.-ted article here.
I feel a beowulf cluster joke coming on...
Boids was a program written to try to simulate the flocking behavior of birds. It was written by Craig Reynolds
Reynolds gave his boids 3 rules:
1 Don't crowd too close to other boids
2 Try to go the same direction as other boids near you
3 Try to be in the average position of your local neighbors.
With just those three simple rules, the boids arranged themselves in a flock. Much to Reynolds surprise, without any more rules than that, the flock exhibited other emergent behavior, such as a flock that split up to go around an obstacle would rejoin.
More at: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/
Here is the Google cache if anyone is interested.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
..in a book a couple of years back. the robots will eventually take over the world in nano-form
and cause mayhem and death and disaster. the book?
'Prey' by Michael Crichton
Practical application: self-laying mines. Think how annoying it would be to clear a path and then overnight see the 95% of the mines you missed on day one redeployed in near-randomness across your path back.
(Yes I have MOD points today...it's just more fun to talk.)
Bees and ants seem to be a good argument that it might be a good return on investment. So do search parties when looking for lost hikers.
Robot-1: I heard from Robot-2 that Robot-3 got promoted because she slept with the boss after the Christmas party last year.
Robot-4: I knew something was going on. Robot-3 doesn't even have opposing digits, how can she be qualified for the ball in bucket tests?
With all the advancements and buzz about smarter-than-man AI, and now they're excited about robots as smart as BEES AND ANTS.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
Some are complaining that they can't get to the server, so here is the text:
...
Special to INTELLIGENT DAILY LIFE
Surrounded by buzzing robots that end the session by performing in an orchestra, James McLurkin, a PhD student at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, talks about distributed robotics and swarm behavior to a packed house. His work has its roots in "swarm intelligence"--the study of collective behavior in decentralised, self-organised systems. Think of ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, fish schooling, and many other examples in nature.
During the last few hundred million years, nature has perfected such interactions. Now, scientists such as McLurkin want to get a better understanding of how these biological processes work and apply this knowledge to programming robots for doing complex tasks in groups. Perhaps, this is the ultimate interpretation of the Wisdom of Crowds thesis: individuals don't have to be smart to produce very smart group outcomes. Did somebody mention Wikipedia?
Early on, McLurkin pulls up a slide of Isaac Asimov's famed three laws of robotics, intended to forestall a robot revolt against humanity. "Well, robots don't know how to read, so those laws are not particularly useful", he smiles. Robots are not even smart enough to travel from the stage to the audience: they would get trapped in wires or collapse to the floor. For all the talk about robotics, today an average squirrel can still do more than any robot, he says.
He points to a number of philosophical, not just engineering problems, in his field. Problem number one is that we don't know what intelligence is, nor how to define it. Should we subject the robots to some upgraded version of the Turing test (which says that if a judge can't tell whether he is talking to a machine or a person, the machine passes the intelligence test)?
Can intelligence emerge from interactions of unintelligent components? That is a second philosophical question. As we are all built from molecules, continues McLurkin, either intelligence is something that results from interactions, or molecules are intelligent.
The third and final question is whether an intellect needs a body. Can a brain in a vat understand and experience the world without anything to relate to? Can we build such an intellect?
That slide with the three philosophical questions is subtitled "things that make you go "hmmm", and one can hear half of the audience "hmming".
Having finished with the philosophy, McLurkin gives a brief overview of earlier efforts to mass-build robots, presenting quite a few models, from iRobot Roomba to Honda Asimo to iRobot Packbot, all of them having different looks and different functionality. And, of course, NASA's successful launch of two robots on to Mars.
Quite naturally, he makes a transition to his own work. He has 112 robots in his arsenal and he is trying hard to make them work together. In his view, robots are best at jobs that are dangerous, dirty, or dull: "What if we sent 20 robots to work in hot spots around the world? What if we sent 200 robots to look for surivors after an earthquake? What if sent 2,000 robots to explore Mars?".
It's this last question he wants to address with his on-stage demonstration. McLurkin turns to a few dozen robots that he has on stage (he controls them with a remote). As a starter, he asks the robots to form a line; surely enough, they do. Next, he orders the robots to spread out. They do this too. The demonstration proceeds quite smoothly.
One thing that the robots don't know yet is how to define boundaries of the network, so they often spread out from the center and then get disconnected. The robots can communicate via one another (they know the neighbors, but don't know about everybody else) but
In his second dispatch from the Idea Festival in Louisville, Evgeny Morozov watches a podium-full of robots buzz around like bees, ask each other questions, find an orange, leave the room, form an orchestra, and prepare one day to save your life
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those...
I was there, saw the demonstration, and wondered why this was being done on physical robots rather than on virtual robots. I guess its more impressive to see the little cars roaming around with their blinky lights.
The part of the presentation I didn't agree with was the myths about robots taking over. I think that robots alone won't take over, but once we supply them with the true ability to learn like the human brain learns, we will be dealing with something other than a robot, and its intelligence will quickly surpass a human's. Someone, somewhere, will give it (or a version of it) the means to replicate and improve upon itself, and eventually it will emerge from that as an unstoppable being. Some misguided country will give it human rights and sanctuary, and soon we won't hear from that country again...
Its not science fiction, its science reality. Given time, a brain will be created. The mistake we make today is assuming that we'd have to program it to be smart... We wouldn't. If we create the workings of a brain and expose it to experiences, it will make itself smart.
Professor James McLurkin now goes by the designation "1 of 12".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This isn't actually new technology. Swarm has been an active research technology for some time, in robots and distributed systems.
I for one welcome the new swarming overlords nearest...oh - I've just received word from the swarm that someone already posted this. Ok how about:
In Soviet Russia, bots swarm...oh - that too? Ok, how about just a simple "Profit?"
I think this swarm thing will take some getting used to
From TFA : "...James McLurkin, a PhD student at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory..."
He's a student, not a professor. Way to read the article, Mr. submitter.
Eowyn: I am no man.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Rule #4 - Don't make any abrupt, sudden changes in direction unless you're wearing a parachute.
The Berserkers are coming...
A bigger swarm for their server? Not on its own.
What that swarm needs is load balancing.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In Soviet Russia, beowulf cluster imagines YOU!!ONEONEONE!!!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I, for one, welcome the swarming robotic overlord bits below me as well.
Mmm... Grits...
Michael Crichton wrote about this in "Prey" in 2002:
http://www.amazon.com/Prey-Michael-Crichton/dp/0066214122/ref=sr_1_13/104-4197432-5312718?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190057918&sr=8-13
Come on....
We start off with dumb near mindless swarm bots. And then we find ourselves waging war with a super-evolved sentient robotic hive species!
Have we learned NOTHING from our hours of sitting on our couch watching sci-fi without end as we munch on Oreos and beer?
So if the hurd isn't out yet, the herd is?
At the bottom of the
Swarming and flocking behavior also inspired a freeware game called Swarm Racer, in which you get to control a swarm of micro-racing robots. For Windows and Mac OS X.
Do they run Linux?
Imagine a Beow... wait a second...
I'm pretty sure this is how the Borg started.
...wait for it....
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!
BWAAAAHHHHHAAAAAAHHHHHAAAAAHHHHAAAAHHHHAAAAAAAAA
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
I, for one, do not welcome anybody. Now get out of my swarm. Oop--
DRIVER_IRQL_COMMUNICATIONS_ERROR
Can you imagine a bee or wolf cluster of these?
I'll be here all week.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
I'm sitting idly waiting for my parent post to welcome me so that I can pass it on to my children posts.
How are humans and bees/ants/swarms different?
When you put lots of humans together, they get dumber.
And apparently, a circa 1980 grammar checker. What will they think of next?!
My neighbors don't like me. :(
There goes my view of the world.
As usual, the bad guys are one step ahead of the good guys. The storm botnet implements a similar idea to this. The storm botnet kicks fucking ass.
oops. damn.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Now try to build those on a molecular level and we're in the Diamond Age !
To error is human, to forgive, beyond the scope of the OS.
mmmmmmmmm... nothing.
Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects. -Dave Barry
Why does nobody welcome me?
Just for the record, McLurkin is a graduate student, not a professor at the good ol mit
Do not feed them natural oil!
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Purple Monkey Dishwasher!
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
A common sheet polymer you see at least once a week is produced by a factory that implements the same sort of design to run the production lines. Each instrument only sees the nearby instruments and only knows enough to do its own job.
But, I'm still under NDA, even though we built that system fifteen years ago.
Trade secrets work different from patents and such. You actually have to keep them secret.
yay!, thanks.
Welcome the next!
factor 966971: 966971
I for one, think that you're crazy to be doing this, and my immediate neighbors share the sentiment.
They could also try to avoid revealing that they are using an Apache Server 1.3.3.7 and port 80.
Would you say that you "Live for the Swarm?"
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
No, it isn't.
Swarm intelligence relies on emergence that arises from many simple agents that interact locally with each other (i.e. without a master controller), using minimal rules. These are the keypoints of this field: there isn't a single point of failure, you can ensure degradation of service gracefully, you can even perform self-repair, etc. It allows to solve large problems without having to implement a complex monolithic system.
Naturally, the difficulties then lie in defining the right rules for the swarm of agents to generate the expected macroscopic group behaviour.
I know of at least one shipping company (in Switzerland IIRC) that uses swarm intelligence techniques to give a good solution to the TSP in reasonable time, and uses that to schedule the plan for its trucks daily. More applications are being developed, including small robots to inspect parts in inaccessible locations (e.g. airplane), etc.
theefer
if [ 'whoami' = "robotoverlords" ]
;; ;; ;;
then
echo "Welcome"
fi
or
echo 'Are you a robot overlord?'
read answer
case "$answer" in
yes)
echo "Welcome"
no)
echo "Carbon Units are not true life forms"
*)
echo 'Try again!'
logout
esac
"According to Sir Ricahrd Gregory: Discovery, the spirit of science(London, 1916), a lady approched Faraday after one of his lectures on electromagnetism at the Royal Instution, relaming "But, Professor Faraday, even if the effect you expalined was obtained, what is the use of it?" Faraday's reply is fiven as: "Madam, will you tell me use of a newborn child?"
You can find this as a refrence:
Seymour L. Chapin: 'A Legendary bon mot?: Franlink's 'What is the good of a newborn baby?"
Proceedings of the American Philophical Society, 129(1985) 278-290.
Why?
Group minded robots? We've had that for years, we call them teenagers.
o hai
I, for one, welcome our new grits.
I wonder if fuzzy logic would allow a computer to play the game "telephone"... It's like the ultimate Turing test!
Thankyou, kind [sir|madam], for your welcome. In my turn, offer my most heartiest salutations and felicitations to the postee hereunder.*
*Contents may settle during shipping.
P.S. "Please type the word in this image: original"
... and not JUST a troll, but myopic and naive to boot.