Marlon DeMoz: We could wait a very long time for the robots to evolve the scaling laws but what you're saying is we don't need to, because we've someone else has done the work in a totally different system. That principle is just as applicable in our little complex system of interacting robots, as he is in the human body. And because we understand how it works, we can try it here and I think the really beautiful thing is when you try it, it did give you the results that you needed.
Imagine you were going to Mars with a swarm of robots, and you needed to send those robots out foraging. How would you program them? A traditional top-down approach to programming would mean programming what every single robot is going to do, and that's going to get complicated fast.
So in this episode, we're joined by Melanie Moses, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Melanie is going to explain how you can take lessons from complexity science, and utilise a bottom-up approach to programming a swarm. In other words, she's going to explain how you can program the robots to interact with one another. And if you thought you'd heard the end of scaling or power laws, then you're in for a surprise, because Melanie is going to share how scaling fits in with her work on getting robots to work as a team.
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