Lying Robots

Swiss scientists at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have conducted an interesting experiment with light sensitive robots, where the robots are allowed to pass on genes and evolve throughout the generations. Some very interesting emergent behavior was the result, including robots lying to other robots for personal gain and robots “dying” to save other robots. Here’s a link to the full story: lying robots

“ANTS – NATURE’S SECRET POWER” DOCUMENTARY

Here is an excerpt from the documentary. The excavation is fantastic!

BIOMIMICRY AND FLOW IN CITIES

Dayna Baumeister is a biologist in the field of biomimicry, an educator and design consultant. She is the co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild.Of course you know my answer, biomimicry! Taking us out of nature and consolidating in urban centers furthers the artificial divide between humans and nature, as if they are two separate things. It does not occur to us that we’ve been on this planet for a mere few seconds if you look at the age of the earth, yet we think that these big brains are all that it takes to figure out how to live. Nature has been around for 3.85 billion years, and that is exactly what we need to do, to ask nature how it does it. We need to ask the whale how to do it. How do you transport such a large biomass thousands of miles on just fractions of energy? We need to ask the gecko how to climb walls without glue. How does an ecosystem filter water? Can we mimic them? With six or seven billion of us, the only way we can live on this planet is to have a substantial proportion in the cities, but cities cannot function like the way they do today. We need to have cities themselves mimic ecosystems. Flow is everything. Ecosystems work because flow is fostered by the form of the system. The forms of our cities today do not foster flow. That is where redesign comes in. I think emergent systems like slumsÑif you aren’t imposing hierarchical human hubris on top of that systemÑwill evolve to become working, functional systems, but we have to create the conditions to allow natural evolution to occur as opposed to creating artificial constructs that hinder flow and the form and pattern that we need.

Here is a link to Case Studies of Biomimicry.

Social Networks in Cuba: Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR)

by Mari Nakano

Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR’s) are neighborhood-based organizations that were initally formed in defense of the Cuban Revolution. They are networked all across Cuba with anestimated 122,000 chapters and approximately 7.6 million members. Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), are citizen-based forces meant to reinforce the Cuban government’s goals and ideals. They
exist so that information can be disseminated rapidly in a fashion that is not dependent soley on the affordances of mass media. Their initial purpose was to protect Cuba from the United States Counter Intelligence Agency (CIA) spies, but over the years has transformed in a way that gears itself more towards the needs of the community.

View the visual interpretation here.

Deborah Gordon Video

A video of her talk about collective behavior in ant colonies that was filmed in 2003 at the TED conference. It was posted on the TED site in January 2008. View it here.