Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

Ah and we take another step closer to cylons and the world of Cory Doctrow.

Look at your computer setup and imagine that you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you’re in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right – a self-replicating machine. [ read more from the RepRap home page]

More information:
RepRap blog has available kits to build your own RepRap.
Documentation

And see also:
Five ways to print your own 3d objects ( SciAm slide show )

The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation thinks religion is just a part of evolution. How totally fitting is it that those least likely to believe the theory of evolution because of religious beliefs do so because of evolution?

The reason this is here on the AI blog is because this was tested using sims. The code is open source. You can download a copy of “Evogod” and read the papers ‘Is Religion an Evolutionary Adaptation? for yourself.

If you are interesting in building sim worlds this this is a great place to start.

Self building wireless technology has lots of promise and more than a few companies working on it. These networks would allow us to go into a disaster area or a war zone, release our wireless sensors or transmitters and blanket the affected area. Once that is done we could communicate with each other; something that was a large problem during the 9/11 attacks for rescue personal. Or we could deploy sensors that could send back images, test air quality or broadcast information to those in the area. Most phones now allow wireless access to any network so civilians in the area could communicate with rescue personal or each other.

. . . Networks of mobile sensors and other small electronic devices have huge potential. Applications include emergency management, security, helping vulnerable people to live independently, traffic control, warehouse management, and environmental monitoring.

One scenario investigated by European researchers was a road-tunnel fire. With fixed communications destroyed and the tunnel full of smoke, emergency crews would normally struggle to locate the seat of the blaze and people trapped in the tunnel.

Wireless sensors could cut through the chaos by providing the incident control room with information on visibility, temperatures, and the locations of vehicles and people. Firefighters inside the tunnel could then receive maps and instructions through handheld terminals or helmet-mounted displays.

For this vision to become reality, mobile devices have to be capable of forming self-organising wireless networks spanning a wide variety of communications technologies. Developing software tools to make this possible was the task of the RUNES project. . . .[ read more Wireless Networks that Build Themselves ]

More information:
RUNES

Papers:
The RUNES Middleware: A Reconfigurable Component-based Approach to Networked Embedded Systems ( pdf )
ASCENT: Adaptive Self-Configuring sEnsor Networks Topologies ( pdf) ( different company same idea – this is a self deploying sensor network that communicate wirelessly )