Which has obvious parallels to possible failure states of robotic swarms.
Large quadcopter type drones also don’t ‘coordinate just fine’, you can look into it yourself what the requirements are for hosting those huge shows. The requirements are not simple or easily reducible to a few paragraphs of instructions.
Intel even released a promo video touting, in 2016, how a challenge of 500 drones in simultaneous operation was groundbreaking and incredible even with their state of the art technology.
“The difference between 100 and 500 is mind-blowing.”—Natalie Cheung, Light Show Business Lead, Intel
You need to do a bit more research if you were unaware of the complexities.
Thanks for the links! My intuition was that space is big enough that global coordination isn’t always needed to avoid basic failures like collisions but I definitely do need to do more reading/thinking/modeling to figure out how valid that intuition is.
Does anyone have a link handy related to complexity of coordinating Earth’s satellites?
Earth has fewer than 10^4 satellites. Taking apart Mercury over year-like timescales would mean enough equipment to remove a thousand tonnes of rock and metal per hour in every square metre.
I’m sure a superintelligence can find a way to do that, but I’m pretty sure that the optimal solution won’t be a flock of duck-sized probes nibbling it to death, no matter how numerous.
Huge flocks of birds also occasionally dive straight into the ground, injuring many of them. Such as https://www.boston.com/news/world-news/2022/02/17/mexico-viral-video-explained-100s-of-birds-diving-to-ground/
Which has obvious parallels to possible failure states of robotic swarms.
Large quadcopter type drones also don’t ‘coordinate just fine’, you can look into it yourself what the requirements are for hosting those huge shows. The requirements are not simple or easily reducible to a few paragraphs of instructions.
Intel even released a promo video touting, in 2016, how a challenge of 500 drones in simultaneous operation was groundbreaking and incredible even with their state of the art technology.
“The difference between 100 and 500 is mind-blowing.”—Natalie Cheung, Light Show Business Lead, Intel
You need to do a bit more research if you were unaware of the complexities.
Thanks for the links! My intuition was that space is big enough that global coordination isn’t always needed to avoid basic failures like collisions but I definitely do need to do more reading/thinking/modeling to figure out how valid that intuition is.
Does anyone have a link handy related to complexity of coordinating Earth’s satellites?
Earth has fewer than 10^4 satellites. Taking apart Mercury over year-like timescales would mean enough equipment to remove a thousand tonnes of rock and metal per hour in every square metre.
I’m sure a superintelligence can find a way to do that, but I’m pretty sure that the optimal solution won’t be a flock of duck-sized probes nibbling it to death, no matter how numerous.