Imagine you were going to Mars with a swarm of robots, and you needed to send those robots out foraging. How would you program them? A traditional top-down approach to programming would mean programming what every single robot is going to do, and that's going to get complicated fast. 

So in this episode, we're joined by Melanie Moses, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Melanie is going to explain how you can take lessons from complexity science, and utilise a bottom-up approach to programming a swarm. In other words, she's going to explain how you can program the robots to interact with one another. And if you thought you'd heard the end of scaling or power laws, then you're in for a surprise, because Melanie is going to share how scaling fits in with her work on getting robots to work as a team. 

 

Resources and links:

• Simplifying Complexity - How do bees self organise?
• Simplifying Complexity - Scaling 1: Why do we live longer than mice?
• Simplifying Complexity - Scaling 2: You and I are fractals
• Simplifying Complexity - Scaling 3: Why companies die, but cities don’t
• Complexity - Melanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & Computation

 

Connect:

• Simplifying Complexity on Twitter
• Sean Brady on Twitter
• Sean Brady on LinkedIn
• Brady Heywood website

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.