![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Ants are dumb
Apr. 11th, 2005 11:41 amThere is a movement in robots - "biorobotics" or "biologically inspired robotics." This is a relatively insightful idea that essentially says "Some animals, despite being dumb as stumps, can do some pretty complex things. Our robots are dumb as stumps; perhaps we should look into this."
The answering question is: "When was the last time you needed to build an anthill?"
Last Friday, I cleaned my desk. Everything off, soaped up, wiped down clean. The ant population decreased substantially.
They're still here.
An entire weekend of nothing to eat, nothing to find, and the little idiots are still crawling around my desk because someone else's scent trail is telling them to. Most. Inefficient. Search. Ever.
Which I suppose is why there's billions of them. There have to be, or they'd die from stupidity.
I seem to recall from last spring that, if I tough it out long enough, they eventually get the hint and go away. Or, I can go get some ant traps.
[Biorobotics actually may have some useful applications in areas like detection of Improvised Explosive Devices or chemical plumes - but... as humans, we want to have our cake and eat it too.
See, ants are dumb. Even after they've found the food, it can take a while before that conga line really gets going - and even after it does, there are ants who can't seem to keep up. Ants find food and start dragging it back home, leaving a scent trail as they go. I don't think the other ants can even tell which way the trail goes at first. They only know about it if they stumble across the scent trail.
We want our swarms of idiot search-bots to suddenly become all smart when they find something dangerous and tell us things like the exact coordinates, or information about what they see. Because, you know, they're looking for something dangerous and we want to mitigate that right-the-hell-now. That kind of on-board sensing and intelligence - not to mention communications - is expensive in terms of dollars, pounds, and watts. So pretty soon your swarm-bots are costing thousands each and weighing more, so your swarm size has to drop from budget constraints, which means you can't really afford, time-wise to use the Most Inefficient Search Ever approach, so your whole bio-inspired paradigm sort of falls apart.]
Brought to you by the numbers e and i.
The answering question is: "When was the last time you needed to build an anthill?"
Last Friday, I cleaned my desk. Everything off, soaped up, wiped down clean. The ant population decreased substantially.
They're still here.
An entire weekend of nothing to eat, nothing to find, and the little idiots are still crawling around my desk because someone else's scent trail is telling them to. Most. Inefficient. Search. Ever.
Which I suppose is why there's billions of them. There have to be, or they'd die from stupidity.
I seem to recall from last spring that, if I tough it out long enough, they eventually get the hint and go away. Or, I can go get some ant traps.
[Biorobotics actually may have some useful applications in areas like detection of Improvised Explosive Devices or chemical plumes - but... as humans, we want to have our cake and eat it too.
See, ants are dumb. Even after they've found the food, it can take a while before that conga line really gets going - and even after it does, there are ants who can't seem to keep up. Ants find food and start dragging it back home, leaving a scent trail as they go. I don't think the other ants can even tell which way the trail goes at first. They only know about it if they stumble across the scent trail.
We want our swarms of idiot search-bots to suddenly become all smart when they find something dangerous and tell us things like the exact coordinates, or information about what they see. Because, you know, they're looking for something dangerous and we want to mitigate that right-the-hell-now. That kind of on-board sensing and intelligence - not to mention communications - is expensive in terms of dollars, pounds, and watts. So pretty soon your swarm-bots are costing thousands each and weighing more, so your swarm size has to drop from budget constraints, which means you can't really afford, time-wise to use the Most Inefficient Search Ever approach, so your whole bio-inspired paradigm sort of falls apart.]
Brought to you by the numbers e and i.
