While I agree that the CIA can figure out most of what a country might do, I think it is better to say that the CIA can figure out what things might happen but can only give probabilies of what will happen. When you put it that way, you realize the difficulty of accurately predicting an individual terrorist's behavior. Um... I guess like psychohistory ala Asimov.
Ah... but heap objects never go out of scope. So unless everywhere that an exception can be thrown is free from heap allocations, you might be in trouble either way. Or rather if you've coded it well, you won't have leaks either way.
As far as the trig functions, same was true here in the states as far as high school math (trig and calculus) and beyond (electrical engineering degree).
You mock me because I posted as an AC? How about responding to my points? Just in case you don't want to respond to an AC, I logged in for the first time in almost two and a half years because people like you fucking piss me off.
Inside is a liquid. Accutane has never been offered in a powder form. If you took it 15 years ago, that would be 1990. It had been out for 8 years so it's not like you had some experimental powder form. It had been widespread by that time. You would have had pink, red or yellow pills instead of the brown and white one in the picture. If you took 80mg, I'd guess one yellow in the morning, one yellow at night? Am I right?
So why don't you answer... how did the people you talked to get 5mg pills?
How much do you weigh? (Important to know to understand your dosage).
I worked in the same research group at CMU while this technology was being developed. I don't think the person you met was one of the original developers because except for one PhD student they have all graduated. It was originally developed for a DARPA funded project. Machine-gun targetting you say? Yeah, maybe. Actually it was more like find the human and follow it. I could tell you what we did with the human afterwards but then I would have to kill you.
How many coders and lawyers do you know that make $90,000 in a country where the cost of living is $1 US per day?
Is there some reason that all wages should be compared to an absolute value versus a relative purchasing power? Even in the grand old US of A we have different costs of living in various parts of the country. Do we complain that an engineer in Iowa is making $50,000 and the same job is paying $90,000 in the Silicon Valley? Nope. Know why? Cost of living!
You must be one of the people who think 4WD solves everybody's problems with driving in ice and snow.
I was driving home from Tahoe in near blizzard conditions, lots of snow on the ground, very slippery. I was in my Honda Accord with chains much like every other sane car driver. The Toyota 4Runner in front of me had snow tires. Care to guess which one of us lost control and ended up being t-boned by an oncoming car? By the way, this occured as the driver started braking.
Tell me, how well does 4WD help when you're trying to stop your massive SUV? What exactly is the benefit of having 4WD? Do you even know?
Re:Dear God!!! You LIKED it??!!
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 2
It is always fascinating to hear someone's honest opinion without being subject to the decades of previous reviewers. Numerous famous books fall under the category of almost never being published do to lack of interested publishers or being buried in notoriety from first reviews.
Someone seeing 2001 for the first time in the present period will no doubt have heard of the high regard for this film and Kubrick so their opinion will be subject to the effect of their knowledge of it's previous critiques. As far as being shallow I disagree but think this is an effect of someone's contemporary environment and their body of reference.
For all you non-EEs out there, Silicon Dioxide (SiO_2) is used in chips as an insulator. It is not that we're removing all the silicon from the chip, just replacing some of the insulating material. These articles are not talking at all about the silicon wafer substrate.
Some of the silicon dioxide has already been replaced for a couple years with materials called "low-k dielectrics" which basically means it results in lower capacitance (lower capacitance == faster chip) than silicon dioxide. This is only on the metal layers which are relatively far from the transistors. The silicon dioxide mentioned in the article is the insulator used in the actual transistor itself. It is the one that is going to be "atoms thick" and it is one of the fundamental parts of the transistor.
It isn't too hard to figure out why they are referencing pythagoream theorem, is it? Previous routes were rectilinear, now routes can use the hypotenuse. The difference in route length (best case) can now be computed using the pythagoream theorem as a route of length 2 (one unit horizontal, one unit vertical) can be reduced to 1.41.
So if every single route used straight lines, the routes would be MAXIMUM of 30% shorter. That's if every single layer could use perfectly straight connections between routing points going at arbitrary angles (actually for 30% that means every route goes at 45 degrees which is stupid because then why don't you just rotating the whole chip by 45 degrees!).
The best case unfortunately is not going to happen. With five routing layers and route length uniformly distributed, if you decrease the route length on layers 4 and 5 by 30% you only get overall a 12% decrease in wire length. And that 30% is a theoretical best case! On real designs if you restrict layers to only use 45 degree angles, you will never get even close to the maximum of 30%.
The problem is that Cu interconnects and SOI needed actual research and experimentation to accomplish. This announcement is trivial compared to those. Also Toshiba and Simplex have nothing to do with the actual "technology" when it finally works (will take 2+ years). The goal is basically implementation of an e-beam etcher that can draw in arbitrary directions which will be done by companies like Applied Materials. There's nothing special about the software they'll be using.
Experiments may not go the way they were planned but this (apparently) wasn't even a failure of the scram jet which would be a failure of their hypothesis. This was simply a malfunction in the experimental apparatus (rocket) that will probably result in no new information about the scram jet.
I'm sure NASA did many, many experiments to determine the feasibility of the actual scram jet experiment and if may have worked if it were not for the unfortunate circumstance of the booster rocket. They'll figure out what went wrong, try to prevent it from happening in the future and (hopefully) try again.
These people were working for how long without pay? If they are putting that much trust ($10 million dollars worth) into their company, that is their first mistake. If they demanded their compensation as soon as they missed their first pay check they wouldn't be in as bad a situation.
The post I was replying to (did you read it) was saying that these people took pride in their work and didn't want to move on which as I said is perfectly fine. As it became obvious that they weren't being paid at the first missing paycheck, then at that point they chose to take pride instead of money.
This is now kind of non related but I should clarify the issue of trust. Suppose you get a paycheck every two weeks for $5000. You are basically giving the company a loan during the time you work and after the two weeks is over, you expect the payment. You trust the company will pay you what they owe. For most lenders, if a borrower defaults on a loan, they don't usually offer the borrower another loan. The first loan is basically their acceptable risk. If you loan someone $5000 and they don't pay it back, do you lend them another $5000 and when they default on that another $5000?
If you read the article you would also see that these people are also demanding that the government give them jobs. And just what principle does this fall under?
Ok, suppose the way the phone works is that it has a fixed 4096-bit asymmetric key (on a smart card) and it's only used to encrypt the smaller 128-bit symmetric key. So in this case if the private key is compromised then you may be out of luck because an attacker will be able to decrypt the packets that are actually transmitting the symmetric key. However, there are methods (Diffie-Helman) of transfering a key between two parties such that an eavsdropper still cannot figure out the key. These are time consuming as you pointed out.
On any hardware device, especially one with analog circuits (like a cell phone) there can be plenty of sources of randomness: background static in the microphone, fluctuations of the RF signal. It should be quite easy to seed a random number generator from these sources. Even if the random number generator is known, it is not always possible to even remotely guess at what the next numbers will be without knowing the seed and internal state.
As for the first question, most likely the key is used for a single session (phone call) and regenerated at each subsequent call. It is also definitely possible that the key may be regenerated during the phone call so every 10 seconds (for example) it may re-handshake with a new key thereby requiring an attacker to again crack the new encryption key.
Indeed specialized hardware takes alot of the fun (fun as in watching paint dry) out of brute-forcing a crypto scheme but there are limits to how effective it can be with longer keys. And of course a 128 bit key doesn't mean much without knowing the encryption algorithm and implementation which may have it's own flaws that make an attack relatively trivial.
For example, why find an MD5 collision (128 bits) if all you need is to crack 40-bit RC4!
What do you expect from a comment that shows how lazy, unmotivated, uneducated and incompetent you really are. "I can't find mutual funds without Microsoft!" I bet you that I could go to two of the largest mutual fund companies, Vanguard and Fidelity and less than 25% of the funds would include Microsoft. Ever hear of mid-fucking-cap stocks?
Being an asshole never bothered me any. I find it keeps away irritating posers like yourself, Lee.
Hmm, either you're really dumb or you're new to investing. Hint 1: Not all funds are technology funds. Hint 2: Just because you "know" the sector doesn't mean you "know" the stocks. Hint 3: Corrolary to Hint 1, try investing in a different sector. Let's see, Microsoft is tech, don't invest in tech. Microsoft is large cap, don't invest in large cap. Microsoft is a US company, don't invest in US market. Not too hard.
I know you're not new to investing but that Microsoft remark was the most boneheaded thing I've heard on/. for a while.
Yeah, the sad fact is that intelligence doesn't equal real world success. You don't deserve anything that you don't work for. Some intelligent people don't realize that until it is too late.
Conformity is EVIL! EVIL I TELL YOU! What this world needs more of is free-spirited bare-footed bearded (that goes for women too) engineers that disobey the laws of mathematics and physics. Don't get me started on how new discoveries in physics come to be. Teachers have no knowledge that is useful anyway. Bright kids have God given rights to whatever they desire and do not have to prove themselves to anyone.
On a side note, I was at a talk with Douglas Copeland almost 8 years ago in Santa Cruz, California. He had some very interesting ideas that people who are good at computers are the most conforming of any groups of people because they follow all the arcane rules presented to them by computers.
It goes the other way too. There are plenty of places that would rather hire a Ph.D.. It SHOULD simply come down to who can do the job and how much they're paid to do it but that's not always how it works out. Even saying that you would choose 4 years experience over a Ph.D. discounts everything related to how the person with 4 years experience and the Ph.D. could do the job. I doubt you meant it literally and it sounds like you're reasonable so you probably would care much more if they could do the job and their other qualities not listed on a resume.
I totally agree that as long as he works hard, he'll be fine. Industry experience is very valuable but I would caution him to choose carefully for something that will benefit him in the future. Or at least something he's interested in. He will learn more than he could imagine in virtually any internship but if he can find something that will move him towards future goals that's an extra bonus.
Re:BEAM is the Cold Fusion of Robotics
on
The Robot Diaries
·
· Score: 1
um, that makes no sense. I think I know what you mean though. The problem with that argument is that the closer a BEAM robot gets to an obstruction, the more likely it
will be to turn away. And it will eventually find it's target. I've never heard anyone in BEAM say that a BEAM robot had the ability to 'pathfind'. They simply aren't
designed to do so. Why is that so hard for you to understand? For example...
I was trying to have a real conversation with someone and you had to come back and get into this. Here we go again...
Are you just stupid? You don't understand a beacon that can be seen anywhere within a building? There's a nice law of electromagnetics that says the field intensity decreases with the square of the distance away from the source.
Close to beacon... strong signal. Far from beacon... weak signal. Got it? You seriously have no clue about BEAM robotics from what I am hearing.
The problem with that argument is that the closer a BEAM robot gets to an obstruction, the more likely it
will be to turn away.
Where are you getting this bullshit? Again it does nothing more than wanders. Why is this better than normal robots? Now you are arguing like this... "No, no, no.. you just don't understand. BEAM robots don't do path planning, see, they just work." They what the hell are they good for? Tell me! I am asking you do demonstrate what they are good for? You in your two pointless comments have not told me. You know I'm not impressed by dust pushing robots or light avoiding robots so let's go... find something I'll enjoy.
Let's take your 'find the beacon in a building' robot. Can it lift off of the ground, land somewhere, retrieve a beacon, and then return to it's original location? Well, if it can't,
it must not be a real robot. What a fool you are.
What are you mumbling? I'm talking about tasks that current robots can do. Actually your task is not far from state of the art. There are many of autonomous helicopters that do very similar tasks. I'm directing you to International Aerial Robotics. Competition.
I've been asking for a demonstration of something a BEAM robot can do without doing as a side effect of wandering and while I have given you plenty of information you seem to just want to argue and say I'm wrong. Show me! Show me something that BEAM robots do that normal layered architecture robots cannot do.
You keep jumping around with different arguments, none of which have an extremely solid basis. You keep saying that BEAM sucks (basically), and yet you backup to
mention that reactive robotics works and is proven to work. You insist that a BEAM robot can't do anything useful, and refuse to recognize the usefulness that has already
been mentioned. And then you compare two seperate robotic fields, expecting that the comparison will save your argument.
Lets go one argument at a time then. Give me the first to talk about. I said that reactive robots have the potential to do anything given sufficient complexity. If you had half a brain you would realize this means a far more successful architecture will take reactive control as far as it can go (without extremely high effort)and then add a higher level of cognition and use that higher level with the abstraction of the lower level.
As for my saying BEAM robots don't do anything useful... sure cutting my lawn is useful. But current non-BEAM robots can do that. I am asking why are BEAM robots more useful than "normal" robots? Are you now saying that BEAM is in an entirely different class and cannot be compared with normal robots? If so... WHY? WHAT IS SO DIFFERENT AND GREAT AND SPECIAL ABOUT BEAM? I am asking someone, anyone to articulate their beliefs about BEAM.
Re:BEAM is the Cold Fusion of Robotics
on
The Robot Diaries
·
· Score: 1
By the way if I said that the beacons could be seen anywhere within the building so you could just walk towards it... BEAM does even worse. That type of strategy is called potential field path planning. Think of a horseshoe shaped obstruction. This is the classic argument against classical potential fields. The BEAM robot has to realize that it is not always good to go towards the beacon.
One of my best friends who is still finishing his Ph.D. did work with potential fields while an undergrad and demonstrated a way to get out of problem situations. The method works basically like you would think a BEAM robot would to get out of the situation. For example, if no progress is made, charge some cap that eventually makes you run away from the beacon. Of course his solution was far more effective because the robot knew if it was making real progress or getting stuck in the same location. It would never get stuck in the same location again and again.
Re:BEAM is the Cold Fusion of Robotics
on
The Robot Diaries
·
· Score: 1
Both are equally possible. For simplicity and probably easier for reactive robotics, assume the rooms are identified by some sort of beacon that is detectable when in front of the door.
Re:BEAM is the Cold Fusion of Robotics
on
The Robot Diaries
·
· Score: 1
In general autonomous robots are useful for doing routine things that humans should not have to do.
Here's a quote from my first comment:
Until I can see
a BEAM robot that does more than scamper around... until I see a BEAM robot that can play soccer... until I see a BEAM robot that cooperate with another BEAM robot... until I
see a BEAM robot walk into a volcano, drive on mars, navigate a hospital, retrieve books in a library... I don't want to hear about BEAM
Um... I should mention that I think people should play soccer but I would also like to see BEAM robots do it.
I am personally impressed by any robot that can accomplish the AAAI robot competitions. But for a very specific and simple example, let's see a robot that given a map of a building (one floor is sufficient), can deliver an item from room A to room B. If it can identify room A when it reaches it and room B when it reaches it can even produce its own map.
My personal opinion of Tilden is that he has been very successful in bringing hobbyists back into robotics but Tilden's evolutionary approach to robotics however has yet to demonstrate that it will be significantly different than current architectures once he demonstrates the ability to do tasks similar to what current robots do. BEAM seems to be missing results demonstrating what works and what doesn't. I'm not talking about circuit cores... if Tilden is correct, he will demonstrate that his analog circuits have in fact nothing to do with robotics. He will be able to produce a general theory of robotic control and architectures that can be implemented in arbitrary ways. How are we (as robotics researchs and professionals) to expand upon something that is so lacking of a firm and rigorous foundation.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree that the CIA can figure out most of what a country might do, I think it is better to say that the CIA can figure out what things might happen but can only give probabilies of what will happen. When you put it that way, you realize the difficulty of accurately predicting an individual terrorist's behavior. Um... I guess like psychohistory ala Asimov.
Ah... but heap objects never go out of scope. So unless everywhere that an exception can be thrown is free from heap allocations, you might be in trouble either way. Or rather if you've coded it well, you won't have leaks either way.
As far as the trig functions, same was true here in the states as far as high school math (trig and calculus) and beyond (electrical engineering degree).
You mock me because I posted as an AC? How about responding to my points? Just in case you don't want to respond to an AC, I logged in for the first time in almost two and a half years because people like you fucking piss me off.
Here's what an accutane pill looks like: http://www.drugshipper.com/picture/ro20mgcap.jpg
Inside is a liquid. Accutane has never been offered in a powder form. If you took it 15 years ago, that would be 1990. It had been out for 8 years so it's not like you had some experimental powder form. It had been widespread by that time. You would have had pink, red or yellow pills instead of the brown and white one in the picture. If you took 80mg, I'd guess one yellow in the morning, one yellow at night? Am I right?
So why don't you answer... how did the people you talked to get 5mg pills?
How much do you weigh? (Important to know to understand your dosage).
I worked in the same research group at CMU while this technology was being developed. I don't think the person you met was one of the original developers because except for one PhD student they have all graduated. It was originally developed for a DARPA funded project. Machine-gun targetting you say? Yeah, maybe. Actually it was more like find the human and follow it. I could tell you what we did with the human afterwards but then I would have to kill you.
How many coders and lawyers do you know that make $90,000 in a country where the cost of living is $1 US per day?
Is there some reason that all wages should be compared to an absolute value versus a relative purchasing power? Even in the grand old US of A we have different costs of living in various parts of the country. Do we complain that an engineer in Iowa is making $50,000 and the same job is paying $90,000 in the Silicon Valley? Nope. Know why? Cost of living!
You must be one of the people who think 4WD solves everybody's problems with driving in ice and snow.
I was driving home from Tahoe in near blizzard conditions, lots of snow on the ground, very slippery. I was in my Honda Accord with chains much like every other sane car driver. The Toyota 4Runner in front of me had snow tires. Care to guess which one of us lost control and ended up being t-boned by an oncoming car? By the way, this occured as the driver started braking.
Tell me, how well does 4WD help when you're trying to stop your massive SUV? What exactly is the benefit of having 4WD? Do you even know?
It is always fascinating to hear someone's honest opinion without being subject to the decades of previous reviewers. Numerous famous books fall under the category of almost never being published do to lack of interested publishers or being buried in notoriety from first reviews.
Someone seeing 2001 for the first time in the present period will no doubt have heard of the high regard for this film and Kubrick so their opinion will be subject to the effect of their knowledge of it's previous critiques. As far as being shallow I disagree but think this is an effect of someone's contemporary environment and their body of reference.
For all you non-EEs out there, Silicon Dioxide (SiO_2) is used in chips as an insulator. It is not that we're removing all the silicon from the chip, just replacing some of the insulating material. These articles are not talking at all about the silicon wafer substrate.
Some of the silicon dioxide has already been replaced for a couple years with materials called "low-k dielectrics" which basically means it results in lower capacitance (lower capacitance == faster chip) than silicon dioxide. This is only on the metal layers which are relatively far from the transistors. The silicon dioxide mentioned in the article is the insulator used in the actual transistor itself. It is the one that is going to be "atoms thick" and it is one of the fundamental parts of the transistor.
It isn't too hard to figure out why they are referencing pythagoream theorem, is it? Previous routes were rectilinear, now routes can use the hypotenuse. The difference in route length (best case) can now be computed using the pythagoream theorem as a route of length 2 (one unit horizontal, one unit vertical) can be reduced to 1.41.
So if every single route used straight lines, the routes would be MAXIMUM of 30% shorter. That's if every single layer could use perfectly straight connections between routing points going at arbitrary angles (actually for 30% that means every route goes at 45 degrees which is stupid because then why don't you just rotating the whole chip by 45 degrees!).
The best case unfortunately is not going to happen. With five routing layers and route length uniformly distributed, if you decrease the route length on layers 4 and 5 by 30% you only get overall a 12% decrease in wire length. And that 30% is a theoretical best case! On real designs if you restrict layers to only use 45 degree angles, you will never get even close to the maximum of 30%.
The problem is that Cu interconnects and SOI needed actual research and experimentation to accomplish. This announcement is trivial compared to those. Also Toshiba and Simplex have nothing to do with the actual "technology" when it finally works (will take 2+ years). The goal is basically implementation of an e-beam etcher that can draw in arbitrary directions which will be done by companies like Applied Materials. There's nothing special about the software they'll be using.
Experiments may not go the way they were planned but this (apparently) wasn't even a failure of the scram jet which would be a failure of their hypothesis. This was simply a malfunction in the experimental apparatus (rocket) that will probably result in no new information about the scram jet.
I'm sure NASA did many, many experiments to determine the feasibility of the actual scram jet experiment and if may have worked if it were not for the unfortunate circumstance of the booster rocket. They'll figure out what went wrong, try to prevent it from happening in the future and (hopefully) try again.
NEWSFLASH: Ayn Rand blows up telecom plant.
These people were working for how long without pay? If they are putting that much trust ($10 million dollars worth) into their company, that is their first mistake. If they demanded their compensation as soon as they missed their first pay check they wouldn't be in as bad a situation.
The post I was replying to (did you read it) was saying that these people took pride in their work and didn't want to move on which as I said is perfectly fine. As it became obvious that they weren't being paid at the first missing paycheck, then at that point they chose to take pride instead of money.
This is now kind of non related but I should clarify the issue of trust. Suppose you get a paycheck every two weeks for $5000. You are basically giving the company a loan during the time you work and after the two weeks is over, you expect the payment. You trust the company will pay you what they owe. For most lenders, if a borrower defaults on a loan, they don't usually offer the borrower another loan. The first loan is basically their acceptable risk. If you loan someone $5000 and they don't pay it back, do you lend them another $5000 and when they default on that another $5000?
If you read the article you would also see that these people are also demanding that the government give them jobs. And just what principle does this fall under?
Ok, suppose the way the phone works is that it has a fixed 4096-bit asymmetric key (on a smart card) and it's only used to encrypt the smaller 128-bit symmetric key. So in this case if the private key is compromised then you may be out of luck because an attacker will be able to decrypt the packets that are actually transmitting the symmetric key. However, there are methods (Diffie-Helman) of transfering a key between two parties such that an eavsdropper still cannot figure out the key. These are time consuming as you pointed out.
On any hardware device, especially one with analog circuits (like a cell phone) there can be plenty of sources of randomness: background static in the microphone, fluctuations of the RF signal. It should be quite easy to seed a random number generator from these sources. Even if the random number generator is known, it is not always possible to even remotely guess at what the next numbers will be without knowing the seed and internal state.
As for the first question, most likely the key is used for a single session (phone call) and regenerated at each subsequent call. It is also definitely possible that the key may be regenerated during the phone call so every 10 seconds (for example) it may re-handshake with a new key thereby requiring an attacker to again crack the new encryption key.
Indeed specialized hardware takes alot of the fun (fun as in watching paint dry) out of brute-forcing a crypto scheme but there are limits to how effective it can be with longer keys. And of course a 128 bit key doesn't mean much without knowing the encryption algorithm and implementation which may have it's own flaws that make an attack relatively trivial.
For example, why find an MD5 collision (128 bits) if all you need is to crack 40-bit RC4!
What do you expect from a comment that shows how lazy, unmotivated, uneducated and incompetent you really are. "I can't find mutual funds without Microsoft!" I bet you that I could go to two of the largest mutual fund companies, Vanguard and Fidelity and less than 25% of the funds would include Microsoft. Ever hear of mid-fucking-cap stocks?
Being an asshole never bothered me any. I find it keeps away irritating posers like yourself, Lee.
Hmm, either you're really dumb or you're new to investing. Hint 1: Not all funds are technology funds. Hint 2: Just because you "know" the sector doesn't mean you "know" the stocks. Hint 3: Corrolary to Hint 1, try investing in a different sector. Let's see, Microsoft is tech, don't invest in tech. Microsoft is large cap, don't invest in large cap. Microsoft is a US company, don't invest in US market. Not too hard. I know you're not new to investing but that Microsoft remark was the most boneheaded thing I've heard on /. for a while.
Yeah, the sad fact is that intelligence doesn't equal real world success. You don't deserve anything that you don't work for. Some intelligent people don't realize that until it is too late.
Conformity is EVIL! EVIL I TELL YOU! What this world needs more of is free-spirited bare-footed bearded (that goes for women too) engineers that disobey the laws of mathematics and physics. Don't get me started on how new discoveries in physics come to be. Teachers have no knowledge that is useful anyway. Bright kids have God given rights to whatever they desire and do not have to prove themselves to anyone.
On a side note, I was at a talk with Douglas Copeland almost 8 years ago in Santa Cruz, California. He had some very interesting ideas that people who are good at computers are the most conforming of any groups of people because they follow all the arcane rules presented to them by computers.
It goes the other way too. There are plenty of places that would rather hire a Ph.D.. It SHOULD simply come down to who can do the job and how much they're paid to do it but that's not always how it works out. Even saying that you would choose 4 years experience over a Ph.D. discounts everything related to how the person with 4 years experience and the Ph.D. could do the job. I doubt you meant it literally and it sounds like you're reasonable so you probably would care much more if they could do the job and their other qualities not listed on a resume.
I totally agree that as long as he works hard, he'll be fine. Industry experience is very valuable but I would caution him to choose carefully for something that will benefit him in the future. Or at least something he's interested in. He will learn more than he could imagine in virtually any internship but if he can find something that will move him towards future goals that's an extra bonus.
Are you just stupid? You don't understand a beacon that can be seen anywhere within a building? There's a nice law of electromagnetics that says the field intensity decreases with the square of the distance away from the source. Close to beacon... strong signal. Far from beacon... weak signal. Got it? You seriously have no clue about BEAM robotics from what I am hearing.
Where are you getting this bullshit? Again it does nothing more than wanders. Why is this better than normal robots? Now you are arguing like this... "No, no, no.. you just don't understand. BEAM robots don't do path planning, see, they just work." They what the hell are they good for? Tell me! I am asking you do demonstrate what they are good for? You in your two pointless comments have not told me. You know I'm not impressed by dust pushing robots or light avoiding robots so let's go... find something I'll enjoy. What are you mumbling? I'm talking about tasks that current robots can do. Actually your task is not far from state of the art. There are many of autonomous helicopters that do very similar tasks. I'm directing you to International Aerial Robotics. Competition. I've been asking for a demonstration of something a BEAM robot can do without doing as a side effect of wandering and while I have given you plenty of information you seem to just want to argue and say I'm wrong. Show me! Show me something that BEAM robots do that normal layered architecture robots cannot do. Lets go one argument at a time then. Give me the first to talk about. I said that reactive robots have the potential to do anything given sufficient complexity. If you had half a brain you would realize this means a far more successful architecture will take reactive control as far as it can go (without extremely high effort)and then add a higher level of cognition and use that higher level with the abstraction of the lower level. As for my saying BEAM robots don't do anything useful... sure cutting my lawn is useful. But current non-BEAM robots can do that. I am asking why are BEAM robots more useful than "normal" robots? Are you now saying that BEAM is in an entirely different class and cannot be compared with normal robots? If so... WHY? WHAT IS SO DIFFERENT AND GREAT AND SPECIAL ABOUT BEAM? I am asking someone, anyone to articulate their beliefs about BEAM.By the way if I said that the beacons could be seen anywhere within the building so you could just walk towards it... BEAM does even worse. That type of strategy is called potential field path planning. Think of a horseshoe shaped obstruction. This is the classic argument against classical potential fields. The BEAM robot has to realize that it is not always good to go towards the beacon.
One of my best friends who is still finishing his Ph.D. did work with potential fields while an undergrad and demonstrated a way to get out of problem situations. The method works basically like you would think a BEAM robot would to get out of the situation. For example, if no progress is made, charge some cap that eventually makes you run away from the beacon. Of course his solution was far more effective because the robot knew if it was making real progress or getting stuck in the same location. It would never get stuck in the same location again and again.
Both are equally possible. For simplicity and probably easier for reactive robotics, assume the rooms are identified by some sort of beacon that is detectable when in front of the door.
I am personally impressed by any robot that can accomplish the AAAI robot competitions. But for a very specific and simple example, let's see a robot that given a map of a building (one floor is sufficient), can deliver an item from room A to room B. If it can identify room A when it reaches it and room B when it reaches it can even produce its own map.
My personal opinion of Tilden is that he has been very successful in bringing hobbyists back into robotics but Tilden's evolutionary approach to robotics however has yet to demonstrate that it will be significantly different than current architectures once he demonstrates the ability to do tasks similar to what current robots do. BEAM seems to be missing results demonstrating what works and what doesn't. I'm not talking about circuit cores... if Tilden is correct, he will demonstrate that his analog circuits have in fact nothing to do with robotics. He will be able to produce a general theory of robotic control and architectures that can be implemented in arbitrary ways. How are we (as robotics researchs and professionals) to expand upon something that is so lacking of a firm and rigorous foundation.