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. "

Comments

Boids

[Joaz Banbeck]

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/

Re:wha?

[lb746]

Cars driving themselves.