Swarmbots for good or...?

Ant algorithms are already in use in the fields of shipping and business logistics design. They are also being utilised in the development of Swarmbots...

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends reports on an article that emerged in Wired Magazine describing the development and application of Swarmbots.

I am finding the notion of Swarmbots quite chilling actually. Clearly there are positive benefits, as described in said articles, but there are more sinister applications that come to mind should such devices find their way, if not already, into military arsenals world-wide.

Swarmbots gather, link themselves to each other until the task at hand can be accomplished. If an object has to be moved from one place to another Swarmbots will gather and link until there are enough to perform the task.

This behavior is derived from ants and the algorithms that have been formulated to replicate their decentralised self-organisation. It is also described as , "... a population-based approach to the solution of combinatorial optimization problems."

Resistance of any form would be truly futile should one Swarmbot after another link to apprehend or immobolise people and/or vehicles whether they be on the battlefield or the front-lines of a WTO demonstration.

For more info, read The Swarmbots Are Coming and make up your own mind, are Swarmbots for good, or...?

Posted on February 05, 2004

Comments

Hi Andrew,

I'm trying out LJ' syndication features, and since your blog has an RSS feed, I made your entry feed into my journal space. Scroll down my friends' page - http://www.livejournal.com/users/binsoup/friends/ - to see auto_scribe's feeds.

Not sure if this is okay with you. I hope it is since I belated found out that its not possible for me to delete the syndicated account I made. I was too impatient to tinker around without finishing reading the documentation. :( Fortunately, LJ does not advertise RSS feeds available to its users.

Pi


Posted by: binsoup on February 06, 2004

Hello Pi... no problem with the RSS feed going out at all. Good to see actually :^)

I've been tinkering with RSS as well, the idea being that there will be a seperate page with feeds, largely for my own benefit as it will be a distillation of frequently visited sites including those I can't get to as often as I'd like.

There's some kind of swarm theory embedded in collated RSS feeds, I'm sure... feeds expand and contract representing the dynamism of information, it's sources and what lies beyond the screen and keyboard perhaps...

-ag.


Posted by: ag on February 06, 2004

I'm relieved. My journal's RSS feed address is http://www.livejournal.com/users/binsoup/data/rss/
This is in case you want to pull stuff into your blog.

As for swarmbots, it is just like any technology intended to relieve a percieved inadequacy but will eventually be used by some for more nefarious ends. I'm very cynical today, I know. But when it comes to technology, a little cynicism never hurts.

Pi


Posted by: binsoup on February 06, 2004

i'll add the RSS when we get other components of this site fixed. note the new root address.


Posted by: ag on February 10, 2004