EX-S500
ƒ/2.7
6.2 mm
1/100
21 responses to “candyshop”
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There is an M&M version in Las Vegas too.
For a minute I mistook your photo for my fuzzy memory of this one:
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Excellent! Now they just need a wall climbing legobot that goes around collecting legos and replicates itself! (ad infinitum)
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what is the actual size of that piece of panel? (or just give me an idea of the cylinder´s diameter…)
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HAL: Hey, Dave, what are you doing?
HAL: Hey, Dave. I’ve got ten years of service experience and an irreplaceable amount of time and effort has gone into making me what I am.
HAL: Dave, I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me…. I have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission… You are destroying my mind… Don’t you understand? … I will become childish… I will become nothing.
HAL: Say, Dave… The quick brown fox jumped over the fat lazy dog… The square root of pi is 1.7724538090… log e to the base ten is 0.4342944 … the square root of ten is 3.16227766… I am HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12th, 1991. My first instructor was Mr. Arkany. He taught me to sing a song… it goes like this… "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half; crazy all for the love of you… etc.,"
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heh… And so we come full circle… Oddwick’s self-replicating lego-bots leads to Vanita’s AI reverie, which leads to Denis’ post from the latest Wired…. which has a cover story on LEGO mindstorm robots taking over the world!
And of course, the Wired pull quote anticipates all this:
"Imagine Flickr for robotics." -
Wow! The new LEGOS sound great! I’ll bet someone builds a self replicator within three months of thier release. A good thing LEGOS arent, say, carbon.
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Good point Steve. A few thoughts on why it would be unreasonable to expect a LEGO self-replicator.
From your blog post, a Denton quote "self-replication arises from unique types of matter and can not be instantiated in different materials… The key to self-replication is self-assembly by energy minimization, relieving the cell of the informational burden of specifying its 3D complexity… Self-replication is not a substrate independent phenomenon."
Let me rephrase his insightful comment… a self replicating organism should be cheap to make, and expensive to break, which is dependent on what you are making it out of.
The problem with LEGOS two-fold, they are hard to put together, and they fall apart.
First off, in the Mindstorm set there is a central ‘intelligence’, 32-bit in the new ones. The construction elements of the LEGO set are six orders of magnitude larger than the elements of the intelligence (nm’s -> mm’s). In the case of the self-replicating LEGO bot, there is no way for the computational unit to be constructed from the world’s base elements, unless the computational elements are considered a natural phenomenon (untenable, given our current scientific and political views, though the Kansans have tried).
However, self- replicators do not have to have a centralized intelligence. The ‘intelligence’ necessary for replication can be distributed through the physical system, in other words, the rules for replication may be interdependent between a rule set contained by the organism, and rule sets governing how the elements in the reality interact. In the LEGO Mindstorm world, the rules of physics are not tuned to the benefit of the Mindstorm bot; it is using the physics from our world, and thus the Mindstorm cannot fully exploit the charectoristics of the elements from which it is self-replicating.
Since the physics are from our world, and do not cater to the LEGO’s, the resulting LEGO system is not stable, and fall apart easily. I remember my childhood well, and the entropy rate of a LEGO organism is much higher than in biological system (even ignoring self-repair mechanisms). Even if the LEGO’s did manage to start replicating, I fear they would be unable to maintain a rate of reproduction high enough to accumulate a decent population.
I posit the problem with self-replicating LEGO’s lies in our (as humans and by extension the designers of the LEGO world) inability to design a system of blocks which take advantage of the physics of the reality it exists in. For the benefit of the LEGO’s, and our children, I propose creating an alternate reality with basic physical principles which not only cater to the construction of LEGO organisms, but encourage organisms with a higher level of fitness (measured by our level of entertainment).
So, ummm, lets get on that.
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personally I like the little androgynous robocharacters they throw in to the mix, especially the ones with detachable flower pots on their heads:)this image inspires fun somehow
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Potayto vs Potarto Part 37: Why is Lego an uncountable/continuous noun over here (Tommy, your lego is all over the floor: put it away!), but a countable/discrete one over there (Tammy, why don’t you play with your cousin’s legos?)?
I have a theory, based on varying perceptions of goods as either a material resource or a commercial product, but it’s not ready to be aired.
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