From: Justin Werfel
Subject: "Distraction" architecture in real life
Date: January 21, 2007 3:42:30 PM PST
Hi Bruce,
Professor Hal Abelson of MIT pointed me to your novel "Distraction" when I told him about my doctoral thesis. It reminded him of the Bambakias architecture scheme, where smart blocks tell untrained workers how to put them together to get a desired structure.
My dissertation (finished last spring) is about how to program a swarm of robots to collectively build structures, such that you can just give the system a picture of what you want, and all the autonomous agents go and do something appropriate such that you reliably and provably get the thing you asked for.
One of the themes I explored was the utility of improving the system by increasing the capabilities of the building material. At one end of the spectrum, that means blocks that know what they're trying to become and coordinate the building process, and very simple robots that essentially do what the blocks tell them.
One difference between the system you postulated and mine is that mine has robots do the physical work left to the human team in yours. Another difference is that mine is completely decentralized; there's no single computer that keeps track of what's been done or coordinates the work. The algorithms are designed so that there's no need for explicit communication among robots or global coordination; if everyone independently follows the rules, they'll never take conflicting actions, and the desired structure will emerge without errors or dead ends.
I thought you might enjoy hearing about research that so closely paralleled ideas in one of your novels. If you want more details, my thesis is online at
http://hebb.mit.edu/people/jkwerfel/phdthes.pdf
(there's kind of a lot of it, but I tried to make it readable, and a lot of it can pretty safely be skimmed).
Best,
Justin
–
Justin Werfel
Harvard EECS / MIT CSAIL
