Household Emergent Behavior?

Sam Pullara asks: "I got an IM from my Mom today telling me that she couldn't find her Roomba. It somehow had escaped the kitchen and she couldn't find it anywhere, all the doors that it could reach were shut and she checked under everything. She eventually found that it had gotten into a room and closed the door behind it. Once all household items are networked I wonder if a rich environment like a house will make strange behavior like this commonplace? Will the interactions between all the individual devices create something more than the sum of their parts?"

Re:haha

[way2trivial]

look at the photovore [xs4all.nl] and invert it's seeking circuit. (and add a battery)

Re:"More than the sum..." is a bogus concept.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, here we actually get into semantics - I'd argue that when you say 'more than the sum of its parts', the 'it' you're referring to is a self-contained object.

Rather than argue about the idiocy of whether a Roomba is self-aware, turn to biology instead - it has been shown that the sum of the individual action potentials of some firing neurons in certain circuits carries less information than the collective firing of the same neurons. Now, you can argue that the network is (obviously) affecting how this synergistic behavior comes about, but if I'm speaking at the level of neurons, I can truthfully say that the action of several neurons taken together is more than the sum of the individual parts.

Were I to include the network in the definition of the neurons' behavior, then I'd be speaking of network dynamics, not neural dynamics.

(See some recent work in J of Neuroscience for more info)

Re:lost hardware

[cobbaut]

You are refering to this story Where is Server 54 ? [google.com]
By the way, it was a Novell Netware server, not a unix.

pol :)

Re:lost hardware

[SirPrize]

If I remember correctly, the only reason they noticed that this machine was missing was because of an organisation-wide audit that they were doing. Had the audit not taken place, they might still not know that they didn't know where the server was! :-)

Whoring..

[iantri]

It's "There Will Come Soft Rains".

Complete text, badly formatted [earthlink.net]

Re:Three rules safe.

[jacksonj04]

It constantly amazes me that people neglect this.

In the UK TV series Robot Wars (some of you may have seen), every robot had to have a kill swich which simply cut power. It had to be accessible to any crew member within 10 seconds of reaching the robot, without putting your hand in the way of any wheels or weaponry.

All robots should have one regardless of purpose.

Segways Run Amok

[meehawl]

the possibilities are endless what could happen when you locked a bunch of roombas, some cardea segway-style bots, some aibos and and some humanoid robots in your house.

The fact that I encountered blebs everywhere did nothing to reassure me or lessen what I now realize had become a mania. And a lonely mania at that. No one else seemed concerned about these accidental automatons. There was no official Bleb Patrol, no corps of bounty hunters looking to take down rogue Segways driven by Xerox machines. (I saw such a combo once.) Everyone seemed as blithely indifferent to these runaway products as Cody was. [scifi.com]

For more, check this [slashdot.org].

Paul Di Filippo is way ahead of you.

[ccherlin]

I was browsing del.icio.us from a link in today's Bittorrent article, and I found a highly relevant story, And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon [scifi.com] by Paul Di Filippo. Read it, and beware!