guess who's the new greatest expert on robots

What? Are you think he's not built enough to know what's needed?

-- Randy M. Dumse

When he wrote "The Road Ahead", BG largely missed out on the internet boom which exploded in the next year or so. At least with robotics, he gets to talk about the coming of the future which many other people have been actively engaged in now for a few years already. What's that thing running around my floor? Cool, somebody left me a robo-vac. Thanks, Bill ;-). I guess Sci.Am could have asked Hans Moravec to write the article, but he would have just said the same thing he's been saying for 25 years or more.

More seriously, BG mentions Microsoft wasn't doing anything in robotics as late as early 2004, when he was touring universities, and many people started asking him if his company was doing anything in robotics. So, at the beginning of the article, BG mentions "robotics companies have no standard operating software that could allow popular application software to run in a variety of devices", and at the end of the article we have essentially an ad for Microsoft Robotics Studio.

I have to say, they definitely did 2 things right. First, is adding a library for handling concurrency and multithreaded applications. That's gonna make doing your favorite subsumption stuff a lot easier to do.

Secondly is DSS = decentralized software services for communications with remote distributed processors and devices. Now, this is very good [and makes "me" very happy, given my perspective], although if history is any judge, M.R.S. may soon get extremely bloated. Ehh, nothing a computer with 2-Ghz cpu and 2-GBytes RAM can't easily handle.

In addition, I was very glad to see that BG didn't obsess in the article over humanoid type robots, but viewed the entire endeavor of robotics overall in a more utilitarian way.

Actually, they could have had Donald Rumsfeld write the article, and had more accurate and first hand scientific information. At least Rumsfeld has seen the direct impact of robotics in his job, the use of EOD robots and the operations of UAV's like Predator and Global Hawk.

I am amazed at such an unscientific article has appeared in SciAm.

Hey, who knows. If Bill Gates really wants to get a handle on concurrency, maybe he would want to buy New Micros. Stranger things have happened.

-- Randy M. Dumse

I'm not. I cancelled my SciAm subscription a decade ago.

Ditto. That magazine hasn't been scientific in many years.

Guess I'm not current with them either, so I must have memories from days gone by.

Joe, maybe you might want to retitle this thread or start a new one, but I've often been curious about your program in New Mexico. Are you using robots in the class room? Do you teach robotics? or use them to teach other subjects, there?

-- Randy M. Dumse

while( more moola to be made) { if ("standard operating software that could allow popular application software to run in a variety of devices" == larger_slice_of_market_pie) {

MS=monopoly ; // Wrapper for engineering or fun // & learning how robotics works

return openSource=openSource exp(MS_efforts) ;

cout

Actually, the PT Barnum algorithm which MS implements goes a little like this:

product = random() ; while (sucker_born = sleep(60)){ pre_announce_product( is_Great ) ; product = write_bad_code( buggy && late ) ; if ( believed( make_claim ( product ) == innovation) ) ) { force_resellers_to_commit_to( product ) ; sell_to_suckers( product ) ; } deliver( n_years * late ) for( a_while ){ service_pack = write_more_bad_code( buggy && late ) ; } product = pre_announce_product( next_GREAT_THING ) require_new_hardware( moreDisk && moreMemory && fasterCPU ) ; }