Robots gone wild!

Researchers at Cornell have just convinced robots to reproduce. That is, researchers have built block-shaped robots that are able to pick up, integrate and then hive-off the blocks to create duplicates of themselves. The video from the Cornell site is pretty cool (don’t try the mpg from the NYTimes site–it caused my computer to shut down).

The research is reported in the NYTimes, which reports on an article in Nature (sorry guys, it’s not free). I found the NYTimes article superficial, playing on the sensationalist angle (brave new world and all). Reporting at the Cornell site is better.

What the research shows me is how faaaaar we have to go before we achieve anything like what we have come to expect from movies like I Robot or earlier, Silent Running. Another site shows the state of the art on robot faces, fingers and eyes. It’s enlightening because the work is still primitive. We have robots in the world; they can handle the dirty jobs or give us the minimally intelligent toys. But they’re not C3PO and they are decades away from passing the Turing test.

What the research implies to me is that we have gotten blase about what our science can deliver. Science is a long slow process of careful incremental work. Rarely do advances appear quickly and never just because we wish for them. And where is the sense of wonder in this type of innovation? This is still pretty cool, even if it is blocks. I suppose the sense of wonder is drained into movies like Star Wars, which can do it all in CGI.*

The Cornell article also brings up the problem recognized by researchers in labelling this reproduction or self-replication:

human beings reproduce but don’t literally self-replicate, since the offspring are not exact copies. And in many cases, the ability to replicate depends on the environment. Rabbits are good replicators in the forest, poor replicators in a desert and abysmal replicators in deep space, they note. “It is not enough to simply say they replicate or even that they replicate well, because these statements only hold in certain contexts,” the researchers conclude. The conference paper also discusses the reproduction of viruses and the splitting of light beams into two identical copies. The analysis they supply “allows us to look at an important aspect of biology and quantify it,” Lipson explains.

Associated Links:
Researchers’ web page

*If it’s all been done, then where’s my anti-grav machine?

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