Thread: Spirit Dies?
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Old 12-20-2009, 09:57 PM   #5
footfootfoot
To shreds, you say?
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: in the house and on the street-how many, many feet we meet!
Posts: 18,449
Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. But would NASA listen?

Nooooooooooooooooo. We like our paradigm just as it is, thank you very little.

Quote:
The title of the film is a play on the old engineer's saying that out of "fast," "cheap," and "reliable," you can only produce an end consumer product that is two of those three (the classic example is a car). Rodney Brooks, the robot scientist from MIT, wrote a paper in which he speculates that it might be more effective to send one hundred one-kilogram robots into space, instead of a single hundred-kilogram robot, replacing the need for reliability with chance and sheer numbers, as systems in nature have learned to do. The advantage would be that if a single robot malfunctioned or got destroyed, there would still be plenty of other working robots to do the exploring. The paper was fully titled "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System", and published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1989.
The film is available on VHS and DVD and the soundtrack by Caleb Sampson is available on CD
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