Added 1 new A* page:I'll be plugging away at the drawing board as usual Christmas Eve--tomorrow--but I *will* be taking Christmas off for holiday feasting. I'll be right back at A* on Thursday, though!
Science: Google robot wins Pentagon contest tells how a Chinese company (recently acquired by Google) fielded the winning robot in a contest held by DARPA, which revolved around the robots performing a series of tasks that might be useful in a search and rescue / repair operation--this came up as a vital topic after existing robots proved their uselessness as anything other than observers in the recent-ish Japanese tsunami-caused Fukushima nuclear power plant radiation leak. The winning robot triumphed rather handily--with notable failures to accomplish just about anything posted by many of the contestants, including submissions from other US government agencies--and you can see it in video action in the article, showing just how...slow it is, even though it got a strength boost over the competition by using capacitors rather than a just battery for its movement; this is because a capacitor can use up its whole charge all at once--camera flash bulbs are capacitors to deliver that big flash of energy, for instance.
So it may be once step closer, but at the rate its going, I guess we don't need to worry about *this* generation of robots being the one that takes over the world...unless they're already doing it so slowly that we can't see it happening. >_>
O_O
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