Barbara Lamar wrote:
>
> On Sat, 04 Nov 2000 21:46:14 -0800 Doug Jones <random@qnet.com> writes:
>
> > Oh, gawd, Joe Michael is still at it. Understand, he's never built
> > a
> > thing- he has a rather meaningless patent,
>
> > If you look at his site in detail, you'll see the telltale word
> > salad,
> > inflation of his self-importance, and paranoia,
> > He's a loon.
>
> Yeah, I agree he's a crazy guy, but that doesn't mean all his ideas are
> worthless, does it?
Heh. Yeah, some of his ideas are okay, but old hat- of *course*, if you
have fractal robots (the basic idea dating back to Hans Moravec's
"christmas bush" concept) you can do very fine grain mechanical labor.
As I see it, JM has overall negative value, by adding no useful new
creative concepts with a huge ration of bogosity.
> I started to include some other more "mainstream" shape changing,
> modular, etc. robot sites just to show that the idea is being worked on
> by people who are not "loons" but I figured everyone knew that already.
For completeness,
A basic overview article with lots of links
http://ai.about.com/compute/ai/library/weekly/aa040400a.htm
J. Storrs Hall's Utility Fog:
http://nanotech.rutgers.edu/nanotech/Ufog.html
Christmas Bush:
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/robot.papers/1980/bush
> JM's ideas for agriculture make a great deal more sense to me than eating
> poisoned food.
...but they aren't original with him. Twenty years ago Robert Forward
described a fractal robot working in the garden aboard a starship- the
idea ain't new, or even startling. Think of a fractal or fog robot as
being the ultimate in coolie labor. Hand groomed food certainly would
be of high quality, I agree.
-- Doug Jones Rocket Plumber, XCOR Aerospace http://www.xcor-aerospace.com
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