Alt-BEAM Archive
Message #00984
To: beam@corp.sgi.com
From: Justin jaf60@student.canterbury.ac.nz
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1999 05:01:30 +1300
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: Overextension
> It would be cool to have a 'hive' of BEAMbots that could compete with other
> hives by finding and gathering different colored ping pong balls. You would
> also have to protect your hive from being raided by competitors. Is this
> overextending?
It might not be very BEAM, but rather than making an ant colony from
robots, something I'd like to do someday is make a computer out of an
ant colony.
Think about it - you can make little Nand gates, Or, And, etc etc,
connected with little tubes, in such a fashion that by trying to
negiotiate through it, the ants are actually performing calculations.
(you might want a heavier type of bug though - using the insects weight
to operate the gate seems the easiest way, and ants are very light,
meaning very fiddly gates).
You also get the added bonus of being able to tell people that unlike
their crappy machines, you have a computer that works better and better
the more bugs it gets in it :-)
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