3 ms·

Your example (sputtering charge onto insulator) is of a similar flavor (but with E fields). The OP article seems like a monkey-patch way of "self-repair". Shoul

by jayajay 10y ago

Your example (sputtering charge onto insulator) is of a similar flavor (but with E fields). The OP article seems like a monkey-patch way of "self-repair". Should we also create a self-repairer for the self-repairer? Little arms repairing other little arms repairing other little arms which are repairing a Raspberry PI. It's a cute, steampunk-y image -- what I imagine Leonardo Da Vinci would have jotted down in a book somewhere. Alternatively, what you said: we could just send out a large number of duplicated devices. This might be easier, but more expensive. How are computers even designed? If a single part fails, the entire thing can still function, more or less -- true or false? What about a brain? A body? Organs? My hand would still work, even if I ripped off a significant chunk of skin and flesh. It will even repair itself over time (the flavor of the OP article). If I cut a biofilm or an earthworm in half, both halves will "work". Now, I am not a computer scientist, computers obviously aren't like biofilms -- but I am not familiar with the extent of this dissimilarity. For example, if I randomly remove 2,000 transistors from a computer (simulating solar wind), what is the probability that the computer will be rendered useless? The second way I interpret what you say is that we actually redesign our computers, inspired more by biology, to be able to still work even if some computing elements or memory elements are flipped or destroyed. This is probably way outside of my lifetime, though. But we are already seeing this in the ML community, with things like dropout. If I removed a random set of nodes from a deep learning network, the network would still work fine, more or less... Edit 2: So, if we had something like that glass with the charged layer (i.e. maybe transistors which created a small magnetic dipole, so the entire device was effectively a ferro magnet), some elements would cop-out and the system would be rendered useless unless it was designed to be robust like an organ losing some cells. But that sounds really hard. We want the transistor or component to maintain some internal state, while being a magnetically shielded box. Hmm... almost like a topological insulator with a doped body.

HCIdivision17 10y ago
Robustness really depends on the computer these days, I think. Flash drives already route around bad sectors, and most computer chips are capable of gracefully degrading performance as sections fail (one of the ways chip yields go up: over build the chip so failures can be routed and sold as a cheaper variant). To your first line, the micromachine-for-micromachines idea often reminds of Feynman's talk "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" [0], which is great at least in how long ago it was made. Turns out it's a really hard problem. There have been some functional versions of the micro arm-onna-arm designs, but they're just stupendously hard to control. I'd love to see some progress on that front, though, because it really is cool when it works. [0] http://www.pa.msu.edu/~yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf http://www.pa.msu.edu/~yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf
- jayajay 10y ago
  Was this the paper that made Feynman the father of "nanotechnology"? This paper's spirit reminds me of Leonardo Da Vinci's futuristic drawings. Incredible that this was written in 1959. I keep thinking to myself when reading this -- only if Feynman was around to see AFM and STM. I think those were created just before he died. I wish he had more time to play around with those, he probably would have loved them. Feynman had truly a deep imagination. I intended the arm-on-an-arm expression to be conceptual imagery, more so in-line with your link, less with OP article. What do you mean by "some functional versions" of this? Please link!
  - HCIdivision17 10y ago
    I've been out of the field for a while, so I don't really know the state of the art anymore. But I had the pleasure of visiting what was then called the Texas Microfactory. It's basically a sort of microvoxel printer, capable of moving components around on a small stage. Here's a link to a paper on the machine, I think: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00417722/document https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00417722/document And a thesis on the gizmo: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.599.6325&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.599... I haven't read it, but it does have some cool pictures around page 40. As you might imagine, control is the hard part. Damn thing was wobbly like all get out, to the point that it building anything at all was the impressive part. And it did - it wasn't practical for mass production, but it certainly could do cool things.

by jayajay 10y ago

HCIdivision17 10y ago

Robustness really depends on the computer these days, I think. Flash drives already route around bad sectors, and most computer chips are capable of gracefully degrading performance as sections fail (one of the ways chip yields go up: over build the chip so failures can be routed and sold as a cheaper variant). To your first line, the micromachine-for-micromachines idea often reminds of Feynman's talk "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" [0], which is great at least in how long ago it was made. Turns out it's a really hard problem. There have been some functional versions of the micro arm-onna-arm designs, but they're just stupendously hard to control. I'd love to see some progress on that front, though, because it really is cool when it works. [0] http://www.pa.msu.edu/~yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf http://www.pa.msu.edu/~yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf

jayajay 10y ago
Was this the paper that made Feynman the father of "nanotechnology"? This paper's spirit reminds me of Leonardo Da Vinci's futuristic drawings. Incredible that this was written in 1959. I keep thinking to myself when reading this -- only if Feynman was around to see AFM and STM. I think those were created just before he died. I wish he had more time to play around with those, he probably would have loved them. Feynman had truly a deep imagination. I intended the arm-on-an-arm expression to be conceptual imagery, more so in-line with your link, less with OP article. What do you mean by "some functional versions" of this? Please link!
- HCIdivision17 10y ago
  I've been out of the field for a while, so I don't really know the state of the art anymore. But I had the pleasure of visiting what was then called the Texas Microfactory. It's basically a sort of microvoxel printer, capable of moving components around on a small stage. Here's a link to a paper on the machine, I think: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00417722/document https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00417722/document And a thesis on the gizmo: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.599.6325&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.599... I haven't read it, but it does have some cool pictures around page 40. As you might imagine, control is the hard part. Damn thing was wobbly like all get out, to the point that it building anything at all was the impressive part. And it did - it wasn't practical for mass production, but it certainly could do cool things.