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January 23rd, 2008
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Entry Filed under: General
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9 Comments
1. badchemist | January 24th, 2008 at 12:05 am
Dear me Frank, chitin is a polysaccharide not a protein. Very cool robots though.
2. Frank the SciencePunk | January 24th, 2008 at 12:45 am
D’oh! Schoolboy error! (I blame a failure of chitin to follow typical nomenclature for polysaccharides – glucose, sucrose, etc., and instead take on the protein naming convention – albumin, insulin, keratin…)
3. Science_fox | January 24th, 2008 at 11:31 am
I’d love a slug eating robot for my garden. They may have natural preditors but they are not doing a very good job where I am.
I’m not sure that releasing robots into the wild would be a good idea, but for small localised areas – a garden / factory etc they would be better than importing bio-solutions because you should be able to prevent them spreading/reproducing. Something that biology is remarkably good at.
4. manigen | January 24th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
“you should be able to prevent them spreading/reproducing”
I think it’s the reproducing that’d be the key difference between a robot and japanese knotweed. After all, for one of these robots to make another one they’d need to be able to smelt.
5. Alan Winfield | January 24th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Glad you like the Ecobot.
Re your question: if we can create robots that are autonomous and biologically embedded in the ecosystem, what are the implications of releasing these hybrids “into the wild”?
If we could make versions of these robots that could ‘survive’ in the wild, they would still have two fundamental limitations. Firstly, they can’t reproduce, and secondly they cannot repair (heal) themselves. Furthermore, they would not be very smart – they would just have a small number of instinctive behaviours and wouldn’t be able to learn or reason. Thus, as soon as any of their components failed, the robots would simply stop working and – as it were – die. There are other reasons this might happen – the robot might get physically stuck, or damaged by a real animal, for example. Ideally the robots would be built from bio-degradable materials so that when they did stop working they would – like real animals – just rot away.
There is perhaps another aspect to consider, which is that Ecobots might be competing with real animals for the same resources. In that case, and if there were enough Ecobots, then I guess it might be just possible that the natural species could be threatened by the Ecobots. I would bet however, that the limited population of Ecobots (that can’t reproduce) simply wouldn’t be efficient enough predators to make much difference to the overall slug, or fly population.
Of course if we could make self-replicating robots (sometimes called Von Neumann machines) – which is a profoundly hard thing to do – releasing these could have potentially extremely serious consequences. Check out the wikipedia entry on self-replicating machines for a very good review.
6. Frank the SciencePunk | January 25th, 2008 at 10:49 am
And of course, where there’s competition, there’s evolution, so it’s not impossible to foresee the animal population evolving in response to added pressure from Ecobots.
In fact, it raises an interesting idea in terms of animal husbandry: instead of selective breeding, we might make machines that would compete with animals in ways that would encourage them to evolve toward what we wanted. Hmm…
7. Sarah Summer | January 31st, 2008 at 10:38 pm
My friend would build robots that ran on bacteria while he was at school–the more deadly the bacteria the better electricity it made.
8. Frank the SciencePunk | January 31st, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Pictures or it didn’t happen.
9. Sarah Summer | July 21st, 2008 at 5:29 am
Thanks for this info! I love robots!
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