It’s a robot eat robot world

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As described on BBC Radio 4‘s normal staid and highbrow Today program as the spectacle of “living robots sucking each other’s brains”, the Magna centre in South Yorkshire is staging an experiment in emergent, evolutionary behaviour in a simple robot ‘ecosystem’.

“The autonomous robots at CRUM (Creative Robotics Unit at Magna) have been designed live together in their own environment and operate without human intervention. The robot colony is divided into two distinct species: Predator & Prey.

To maintain their energy levels ie to stay alive – the Prey ‘graze’ under brilliant white light trees which they must first seek out using their solar sensors. Their batteries charge by positioning their solar panels in exactly the correct place. The Predators, on the other hand, need to hunt down the grazing prey to maintain their energy levels. The Predators have to capture the prey, immobilise them, and then extract their battery power with an energy-sucking fang that is stuck deep into the middle of the Prey.”

The Predators must feed to survive and they are constantly scanning their surroundings for unsuspecting Prey, while the Prey, constantly looking for their next energy boost must dodge the hungry Predators. The two are locked into a perpetual cat-and-mouse game to stay alive.”

» Magna: New from Easter 2002, Living Robot shows!

“A great British tradition”

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Hugh Pearman gets to try out the now-hopefully-fixed millennium bridge, and muses on the British approach to iterative design…

“We departed, happy in the knowledge that we had participated in a great British tradition. That’s the tradition that dictates that you’ve got to have a good idea, get it wrong first time out, then cook up an ingenious, Heath Robinson solution.”

» Gabion: Wobbly no more: testing Foster’s Millennium Bridge.

Here’s to the curmudgeons

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And the sticklers, those who swim tirelessly against the riptide of Reductio Ad Absurdum… Like Jeff Raskin.

“As a curmudgeon, I am delighted to point out that the popular term, Information Design, is a misnomer. Information cannot be designed; what can be designed are the modes of transfer and the representations of information. This is inherent in the nature of information, and it is important for designers to keep the concepts of information and meaning distinct.”

» TaskZ.com | ViewPointz by Jef Raskin
[Via the IAslash]

3g tech boss interview

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Hmm. He probably wasn’t the best guy to shed illuminating insights on what the most compelling 3g killer apps would be…

“We have single mode handsets with browsers and we are loading content. You can walk through the streets and call up the weather and download images,”

Seriously though, if they are as far ahead in terms of network roll-out as Candy states in the interview, 3g companies have to start setting expectations with the market of what it benefit it would actually bring to the populace, over and above talking and messenging, which they can already do perfectly well to their satisfaction.

The kinds of dumb commercials they run at the moment, where existing media paradigms are shoehorned into a mobile context dont cut it [watching a horror movie on a postage size screen on a bus? Dear me... Having said that, I’ve been known to watch DivX Buffy episodes on my vaio on a train…]

They have better, genuinely useful and valuable things to offer. They need to build understanding and demand. The competitior landscape is not what it was, so why not lose the paranoia and share some of the more seductive services they’ve all been working on in order to whet our appetite rather than trot out the same old tired cliches?

» FT.com | CREATIVE BUSINESS: Can Hutchison make pigs fly ?