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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
by 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 agoWas 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 agoI'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.