Spongebob 2.0, Asteroid Dust, & Ping Pong Balls
This Is What Happens When You Let an AI Design a Robot
Image: Matthews et al., PNAS ( 2023)
Researchers at Northwestern University asked an artificial intelligence (AI) to design a robot that could walk across land. The result is not exactly what you’d expect.
The AI first came up with a spongy block that would deform when water was pumped into it. This robot could jiggle but not walk. In the next iteration, the AI found a shape that would make the sponge hop and shuffle. Nine iterations and twenty-six seconds later, the robot could hop effectively. While Spongebob 2.0 doesn’t look like any walking creature we’ve seen before, it does have features that resemble legs, so maybe evolution was up to something with those.
You can watch a video of the robot in motion here, read the press release here, or read the full paper here.
Update on NASAs Asteroid Sample: Water and Building Blocks for Life
Image Credit: NASA - A view of the Bennu sample
NASA announced last Wednesday that preliminary analysis of the 4.5 billion-year-old sample from the asteroid Bennu, brought to Earth by NASA’s Osiris-REx, contains water and carbon, two of the most basic ingredients for life. Initial findings were taken with a scanning electron microscope, X-ray diffraction and chemical analyses. Upcoming examination will reveal whether the sample contains amino acids, more complex materials necessary for biological evolution.
Read NASA’s full press release here.
Sound Proof Your Home with Ping Pong Balls
Imag: Sabat et al., J. Appl. Phys. 134, 144502 (2023)
Stressed out by city noise? Try ping pong balls – no, not in your ears, but as cheap and durable sound absorption. This idea comes from researchers from the University of Lille and the National Technical University of Athens. They started with computer simulations to figure out what makes for a good sound absorber. Based on their simulations, they then pierced ping pong balls to create a tiny hole that would allow air to escape and dampen resonances, and aligned them in a regular array in a box, so that they touched each other. The configuration resulted in excellent sound cancellation, almost perfectly absorbing incoming sound energy and preventing it from passing through the balls.
Comments (8)
What I find intriguing is that if humans were more rational we could reduce the earth's human population to a sustainable level well below 2 billion, replace our extractive economy with a sustainable one that not only closes all loops from waste to production but relies on asteroids for our raw materials thus allowing us to end mining on earth. Previous to money, humans existed in a debt economy in which obligations bound humans together and there was essentially no private property and life was good. The material wealth in the asteroid belt has the potential to make greed out moded: https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/63471074. But we are too smart by half and too greedy.
This is not about this discussion, but the previous one, the part on complexity. In a conversation with Thomas just today, I remembered something I think deserves to be brought to people's attention here, that then I wrote in answer to one comment of his: "Now about something else: what people at the well-known Santa Fe Institute have been doing about chaos and complexity; maybe you'll find this video interesting: https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/video-irene-sanders-chaos-complexity-public-policy " "I am not sure that the application of the concepts of complexity and chaos, as introduced in the first part of the video interview, really apply to the humanities and politics, as considered in the second (and last) part. But they are, in any case, about some very specific types of complexity and chaos, not one-size-fit-all ideas, like those philosophers that Sabine has criticized are trying to come up with." Essentially, the complexity considered in the video's first part is a concept that applies to large systems with many and different interacting parts, with very unpredictable behavior at times and with dynamics expressed either in mostly non-linear differential, difference equations, both. So they do not apply to the complexity of a piece of rock, such as a river pebble, that is not exactly dynamical, but, looked at in a certain way, it can be said to be complex, as I have already explained in the previous edition of Sabine's blog. But it is a different kind of complexity. To find out more about the application of these specific concepts of complexity and chaos in physics and engineering, please google "Santa Fe Institute."
Asteroid dust shows water and carbon in its composition. Well, those two things are available throughout the Universe, carbon being thrown up by exploding stars gone nova; water is present in clouds of tiny crystals of ice throughout interstellar space, and widely present, mainly as water ice, throughout the Solar System, in outer planet moons, Pluto and other bodies in the Kuiper belt and in the Oort cloud included. If traces of amino acids and even proteins made up of these (and Nitrogen with water split by solar radiation into O and H) were found later on, well, that will be really something! It will mean that such stuff was formed already in the very early epochs of the Solar System, when this asteroid the dust is from is thought to have formed. So it can be an intrinsic property of the Cosmos to produce the precursors of life, even at a time when conditions for that to happen seem to have been most unlikely.
I think that what is most interesting about the spongy robot is not that it was "evolved" with an "AI", because it could have been evolved with software that does not implement a neural network (e.g. Conway's "The Game of Life" and its successors) But that the computer *was asked* to evolve such a robot, much as Capt. Piccard would ask the ship's computer to set a trajectory for the Third Quadrant's planet Zog at Warp Five. And the computer (a) "understood" what it was being asked, (b) got to work to do something it was not pre-programmed to do, and (c) come up with something that, maybe just barely, it all the same satisfied the request.
I wonder what the frequency response/absorption of the ping-pong insulation would be for really low frequencies. The problem I have had myself, in some pst occasions, but not now, happily, with noise coming through the median walls, is when neighbors who love, let's say music with a lot of rhythmic backup, and have a sound system with a real big woofer speaker, start to play with the volume as high as possible with such system, their favorite crappy music. Because, while I cannot hear the higher pitched part of their noise, the low frequency part of the buffer cuts like a knife though butter the thickly stuffed sound insulation inside the wall. Then I start to think of lawyers, police and Marcel Proust, the writer of that huge, multiple-volume novel, who lived in a posh apartment on the Champs-Elysees Avenue, in Paris. Such apartments are in very old buildings with uninsulated floors/ceilings and median walls. He lined his ceiling with cork, mostly because of the noisy lady in the one above his. In due course they got to know each other and become good friends. Then, of course, I cannot help but think also of madeleines, although they are not really my favorite cookies.
Best common material for low freq bass blocking is vinyl sheets, thicker the better. Think linoleum on walls. But, now I can imagine Ping-Pong balls made of vinyl... billions of them sandwiched behind sheet vinyl. Just need to upgrade the fire extinguisher system
That'd take a lot of balls!😄
And a No Smoking sign.