Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Stochastic Robots Assemble and Disassemble Themselves

"Stochastic" is another way of saying random, and stochastic robots are robots that harness the powers of randomness to construct themselves. It's a fairly simple idea that can result in fairly complex objects: you've got some number of different modules, which can come together to form a robot. Instead of putting the modules together and building the robot directly, you instead just toss all of the modules and shake it really really hard. As the modules randomly run into each other, each is programed to latch on if it happens to bump into a module that it's supposed to be next to in the final design. And if you do this for long enough, eventually you'll end up with a fully assembled robot. Or that's the basic idea, anyway.




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