Ok, here's the way it was explained to me. Instead of ping-pong balls, imagine a really long rope, that you could pull back and forth to send messages or whatnot. When you pull on one end of the rope (or push in a ping-pong ball), you start a compression wave, and this wave must travel at a speed less than or equal to c. This applies no matter how hard the rope/ping-pong balls are. Like it or not, c is forever (damn laws of physics!)
Unless I'm hallucinating, it looks like the Washington University people just updated their Lewis Webpage once they realized that they were being slashdotted. They've addressed a lot of the issues raised here, including why they built it in the first place. They also added a nice page of specs and some robot-photos too.
I saw the "MIT anemone" at SIGGRAPH this year, and the actual AI was rather limited, if even that. The anemone seemed to just have a motion sensor, and if you tripped it, the robot would play a canned animation of 'fear' by drawing into the far corner and shaking. Of course, if you tried to put your hand in that corner, the robot would run right into you (and the MIT people would give you a dirty look). The robot was also on a schedule, so that it would water some flowers or go to sleep every ten minutes. All canned animations, no actual AI. The robot certainly wasn't using any revolutionary new programming. I think the whole deal was just to see if people could be fooled into thinkning it was more complex than it really was, and to see how they would react to an atypical robot. Of course, come to think of it, I never interact with sea anemone in real life, so there's no way to judge how real MIT's robot was. (definatly not as cool as the virtual swordfighting).
According to a T-Shirt I saw once (and heaven knows T-Shirts are always right!), the human body is worth 6 million for organs, and 25 bucks for everything else that's not transplantable. Of course a DIII demo better be be at least 100 meg, so thats like 6 cents a byte (per person you kill, of course. How bad do you want the demo:)
Companies put the costs of development into everything they sell. If you go to McDonalds and bring your own cup, they'll still charge you for the 1/2 cent paper cup that you're not using. If you buy a newspaper and don't read it all, too bad, you paid for the whole thing. Thats just the way things are.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, here's the way it was explained to me. Instead of ping-pong balls, imagine a really long rope, that you could pull back and forth to send messages or whatnot. When you pull on one end of the rope (or push in a ping-pong ball), you start a compression wave, and this wave must travel at a speed less than or equal to c. This applies no matter how hard the rope/ping-pong balls are. Like it or not, c is forever (damn laws of physics!)
Unless I'm hallucinating, it looks like the Washington University people just updated their Lewis Webpage once they realized that they were being slashdotted. They've addressed a lot of the issues raised here, including why they built it in the first place. They also added a nice page of specs and some robot-photos too.
I saw the "MIT anemone" at SIGGRAPH this year, and the actual AI was rather limited, if even that. The anemone seemed to just have a motion sensor, and if you tripped it, the robot would play a canned animation of 'fear' by drawing into the far corner and shaking. Of course, if you tried to put your hand in that corner, the robot would run right into you (and the MIT people would give you a dirty look). The robot was also on a schedule, so that it would water some flowers or go to sleep every ten minutes. All canned animations, no actual AI. The robot certainly wasn't using any revolutionary new programming. I think the whole deal was just to see if people could be fooled into thinkning it was more complex than it really was, and to see how they would react to an atypical robot. Of course, come to think of it, I never interact with sea anemone in real life, so there's no way to judge how real MIT's robot was. (definatly not as cool as the virtual swordfighting).
According to a T-Shirt I saw once (and heaven knows T-Shirts are always right!), the human body is worth 6 million for organs, and 25 bucks for everything else that's not transplantable. Of course a DIII demo better be be at least 100 meg, so thats like 6 cents a byte (per person you kill, of course. How bad do you want the demo :)
Companies put the costs of development into everything they sell. If you go to McDonalds and bring your own cup, they'll still charge you for the 1/2 cent paper cup that you're not using. If you buy a newspaper and don't read it all, too bad, you paid for the whole thing. Thats just the way things are.
I just can't wait till they make augmented-rality virtual tennis, or PGA golf...