Alt-BEAM Archive
Message #01937
To: beam@corp.sgi.com
From: Justin jaf60@student.canterbury.ac.nz
Date: Thu, 01 Apr 1999 15:39:06 +1200
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: Socer bots/ Hive behaviour
> To make bots that work together weather it be as a hive or as a
> soccer team one thing is certain. Beam alone can not do it. I can
> think of only one way pure beam bots would work together but it would
> not be as a team more as a group of individuals with a common goal.
I disagree. That "BEAM alone cannot do it" is very dubious - much of the
biological functions you described as intelligent are actually the
result of a collective of BEAM-like systems.
Study how those biological systems create apparent intelligence out of
dumb components and you're on the way to a BEAM solution (hence the "B"
in BEAM :-)
Your soccer example, for example, only consists of one system - an IR
tag on the ball. Why not also add an IR tag to the players, with all the
players of a team being the same frequency. Now, wire these three
sensing systems (fellow team, opposing team, ball) such that the robot
tries to avoid members of it's own team, but is attracted to the ball,
and also to opposing team players.
The sum of the competiting input now results in teamwork:
Should the ball be in the hands of a fellow player, the team spreads
out, but with a tendancy to mark opposing players, and a tendancy to
stay resonably near the ball, thus creating a net in case the opposition
gets the ball.
Should the ball be in the hands of the opposition, the team converges on
him, but tends to spread itself around him, limiting his options.
Should the ball be free, something interesting ensures...
This system is non-intelligent and needs no CPU or higher intelligence.
Of course, if you were to actually build it, a lot of fine-tuning and
extra details would be needed to get it to work, because at the moment
it's more of a theoretical example than a practical system, but I think
it demonstrates the point. (eg, the first thing is that it probably
needs fellow avoidance to have a slightly higher priority that the other
two).
That it took me all of three seconds to think of a BEAM solution that
results in teamwork is perhaps also evidence that BEAM is perfectly
capible in this area, regardless of whether the solution I proposed is
not a good one or not :-)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/alt-beam
Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com
Home