Self-healing planes and the future of flight

[Super Nova]

Now aussie will try use this somehow against you.

with statements like.. "well Miss High IQ what does your big brain think of this... wot?"

aussie, please share your IQ?

[Neferti]

Shit.

I started reading SciFi in comics at 8 or so.

I don't have a photographic memory. I don't know what I read or said yesterday.

So I guess I cannot remind you of him unless I use google to pretend.....

No, he was reading proper Science Fiction books (Bradbury, Orwell, H G Wells, Heinlein, Herbert, etc) from childhood. Doubt he even had a comic. I know they weren't allowed in my house. I never read Enid Blyton (or other kids books) as a kid, read a couple and thought them too childish so I used to grab my mother's library books and read those by the time I was about 10.

There was no such thing as Google back when I was married. I used to get annoyed with him because he was usually watching TV, reading a Sci Fi book and, I thought, pretending to listen to me so I asked him "what did I just say" and he could quote what I had said verbatim, and also tell me what had been said on TV and what the last paragraph of the book he had just read. As I said, a smart arse. We used to have competitions on words in the Dictionary! He would ask what something meant and I would have to answer. Then I would ask him, etc. I still have the Dictionary with pencil marks against the words. As a child his nickname was Boffin. Oh and he was quite good on the violin too.

[Neferti]

Now aussie will try use this somehow against you.

with statements like.. "well Miss High IQ what does your big brain think of this... wot?"

aussie, please share your IQ?

Aussie can try whatever he likes. I still have a higher IQ than he does. You don't need to be a genius to get an LLB.

[Aussie]

my IQ is above average.

How do you know?

Nef probably had an IQ test. Like most Australians do. School do them as well.

Remember 50% of the people are below average and 50% are above.

Did you ever get yours tested aussie?

What was your score?

Yeas, I did. Dunno the score, but I was told by the Qld. Department of Education that I topped the State. Believe it or not, I don't give a fuck. I didn't believe it myself.

[IQS.RLOW]

Nah. Your IQ level has been on display for quite sometime. Nef was being extremely generous when she gave you around 100.

Then again, topping the state in QLD probably means you scored 81 which is about where I put you.

[Neferti]

Yeas, I did. Dunno the score, but I was told by the Qld. Department of Education that I topped the State. Believe it or not, I don't give a fuck. I didn't believe it myself.

If that was true, you would remember what your score was. Perhaps we should try Google to find out who the Top Teenage Brain in Queensland was way back in the early 60's? I am sure they would have kept records.

[Super Nova]

Making planes out of this technology may produce interesting results. At least build some of the infrastructure like wings ...etc out of them.

Transformers.... here we go........collective action of thousands of these will be interesting to keep a watch on.

1,000-Robot Swarm Created by Researchers

The tiny troupe could shed light on collective behavior in animals and humans
Aug 14, 2014 |By Mark Zastrow and Nature magazine

Scientists have created a swarm of over a thousand coin-sized robots that can assemble themselves into two-dimensional shapes by communicating with their neighbours.

At 1,024 members, this man-made flock — described in the August 15 issue of Science — is the largest yet to demonstrate collective behaviour. The self-organization techniques used by the tiny machines could aid the development of 'transformer' robots that reconfigure themselves, researchers say, and they might shed light on how complex swarms form in nature.

The puck-shaped robots, called Kilobots, cost roughly $20 each and are programmed with a simple set of rules and an image of the shape to be formed. To begin with, the robots are arranged in a tightly packed, arbitrary shape on a flat surface. Then four 'seed robots' are placed in a cluster next to the swarm, and the robots on the far side of the pack begin to inch around the edge of the formation towards the seeds, propelled by motors that make them vibrate like ringing mobile phones.

The robots communicate using infrared light, but they are only able to transmit and receive information with the robots nearest to them — so they cannot 'see' the whole collective. However, the seed robots act as the point of origin for a coordinate system; information on their position propagates outward through the swarm like fire signals across the peaks of a mountain range. This allows each bot to determine where it is and whether it is inside the shape programmed by researchers. Over a period of about 12 hours, the programmed configuration — such as the letter 'K' or a star — takes form, robot by robot.

Shape-shifters
Building and operating such a large swarm is an impressive engineering feat, says Mark Yim, a robotics engineer at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the study. Previous demonstrations of swarming programmable robots involved roughly 50 units, he says.

This shape-shifting robot flock is analogous to ants that build bridges out of their own bodies, demonstrating modular behaviour that allows them to adapt quickly to their surroundings, says Michael Rubenstein, a computer scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the study’s lead author.

He thinks that such behaviour could be useful in creating programmable matter: tiny robots the size of sand grains that could rearrange themselves into tools of any shape, such as a wrench. These future robots would act “like a three-dimensional printer, but instead of printing with plastic filament, you'd be printing with robots that can move themselves”, says Rubenstein.

Even more futuristic applications of these shape-shifting techniques might be in reconfigurable robots — real-life Transformers. Yim has built a modular robot that can shift itself from a four-legged configuration to a snake-like chain, and says the new study could help to further refine such transformations.

But the Kilobots are not foolproof. A slow bot can cause 'traffic jams' along the outer edges, and the shapes tend to look warped owing to the Kilobots’ imprecise tracking and their tendency to bump against one another before stopping.

Still, these imperfections could provide insights into how natural swarms of animals work, says L. Mahadevan, a mathematician and physicist at Harvard who is not connected to the work. He imagines using swarms of Kilobots to test how collective behaviors in insects develop, compete and evolve. Even questions such as how much of human behaviour is determined by centralized thought versus localized reflexes could be informed by Kilobot experiments. “It’s only limited by your imagination, I think,” he says. “It’s going to be a fantastic toolkit.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... searchers/