The universe tends towards chaos, but sometimes patterns emerge,
like a flock of birds in flight.
But how? How does a group of animals -- or cells, for that matter -- work together in
an organized way when no one’s in charge?
Like termites building skyscrapers out of mud
or fish schooling to avoid predators.
It’s called emergent behavior. Order emerging from chaos.
And you don’t just see it in nature.
Enter the kilobot… a robot the size of a quarter, developed by engineers at Harvard.
What’s so interesting about kilobots is that individually, they’re pretty dumb.
They’re designed to be simple. A single kilobot can do maybe... three things:
Respond to light. Measure a distance. Sense the presence of other robots.
But these are swarm robots.
They work together.
The kilobots can organize themselves into shapes, sort of like how cells form into an
organ in your body.
Here’s how it works.
The kilobots are programed all at once, as a group, using infrared light.
Each kilobot gets the same set of instructions as the next.
With just a few lines of programming, the kilobots, together, can act out complex natural
processes.
For example:
How do a group of identical cells in an embryo develop into different parts of the body?
In nature, this is a fairly mysterious process. But with kilobots, you can recreate it.
See, here, how the kilobots start off blue… then start randomly blinking either red or
green?
Their instructions are really simple: respond to your neighbors, match their color.
But just with that simple programming they begin to differentiate themselves into red
and green sections of the group... a lot like cells differentiating themselves in
an embryo.
Or here, they’re dispersing, based on the way gas bubbles spread out to fill a volume
Here… a swarm of fireflies that start off blinking randomly and eventually begin to
flash in unison.
These kilobots are mimicking the way bacteria find food.
That light represents food.
See how they’re rotating and inching forward, slowly homing in?
Programmers figured out how to make the kilobots do this by watching bacteria search for food
in a petri dish
But here’s the thing:
The researchers were then able to make a better program.
They revised the software, they came up with a new more efficient way of solving the problem.
And that opens up a really tantalizing possibility…
Because our cells can be programmed too.
With the right tools, you can actually go in and alter a cell’s genetic code,
its software.
With the right code maybe you could, for example, teach white blood cells to track down and
bacteria or kill cancer cells more efficiently.
One day, instead of us teaching kilobots to mimic nature, they might teach us better ways
of doing things.
And then… take over the world and destroy us all.
Just kidding!