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WETA Working on Robotic Lizard For Science
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Jun 11, 2007 12:29 AM
from the i-want-me-a-robo-bunny dept.
from the i-want-me-a-robo-bunny dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "The tuatara, which is both related to lizards and snakes, is one of the planet's oldest reptile species. It's been living in New Zealand for about 200 million years. Scientists still don't know much about their behavior, so they've asked Weta Workshop, a Wellington-based company known for its work on 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy, to build a robotic male tuatara. It is equipped with cameras which will help the researchers to discover how real male tuatara attract and keep females. The goal is to help conservation managers to the genetically fittest, most productive males. But what will happen if a female tuatara discovers that the robot is an impostor?"
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Er...how? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Er...how? (Score:5, Funny)
Also imagine how the slashdotters will behave towards their realdolls after having read this. Or better, try your best not to imagine any of this.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Realdolls is what we, humans, can produce. I'm sure that a Tuatara also can't build a realistic model of itself with great success. But we're kinda more intelligent than them and I'd say we could fool a lizard, if we try hard enough.
There's no information what would a scientific project from aliens would do to tes
Re:Er...how? (Score:5, Funny)
I have additional evidence for the Tuaturas being aliens, so it must be true: Remember that Poster in the creationism museum telling us that after the fall of Eden it was harsh work for all of us? Well, think about what Tuaturas do all day! They just sit around on a warm rock in the sun waiting till some small insect comes by that they eat. Is that harsh labor? Also, isn't this an extraorddrinary intelligent way to spend your day, instead of working your ass of for a meager salary? These are not from here dude.
Parent
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Yup, and she was a hot porn star, but when I said "I agree, but without cameras", and they gave up.
Clearly Tuaturas are more advanced than humans. (Score:3, Funny)
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Thus our interest in their mating rituals.
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King Xyylax! We have studied the human mating behavior for years and now know precisely how it happens! Once the woman is boiled, coitus is brief, then the woman is doused in bleach before she is thrown in a closet and covered with dirt
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems you missed something important. Like the fact that the point of this is to learn something about its behavior. They will find out if that shit is even important. I could make an argument for it going either way. My parrot tries to hump me, and I'm not even the same goddamned species, so who knows what they will find.
A Female? (Score:3, Interesting)
So on the first attempt (Score:2)
They should build a female, I've met some pretty crazy females and they do quite well.
Male [Tutuara's] just aren't that discerning.
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Tutuara? (Score:2)
Could we at least get the name right in the title?
Tuatara
Short Treatise On Lizard Dominances (Score:4, Interesting)
tuataras are NOT lizards (Score:2)
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Behavior isn't as complicated as we think (Score:5, Informative)
His insect robots have almost no processing power and yet mimic the behavior of real bugs very well.
Based on Tilden's experience, it would seem that these lizard? experimenters may actually be on the right path.
http://home.earthlink.net/~douglaspage/id25.html [earthlink.net]
What the females will think is... (Score:2, Funny)
Extinction (Score:4, Funny)
Complete Satisfaction?
As a recent transplant to NZ... (Score:2)
*ducks*
Just kidding. Spotted kiwi birds [wikipedia.org] and little blue penguins [wikipedia.org] taste much better.
All joking aside, we've got got a lot of truly unique wildlife here. I feel fortunate to have seen some of these, even if only at the zoo.
-Peter
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*ducks*
Just kidding. Spotted kiwi birds [wikipedia.org] and little blue penguins [wikipedia.org] taste much better.
All joking aside, we've got got a lot of truly unique wildlife here. I feel fortunate to have seen some of these, even if only at the zoo.
Zoo, huh. Is this the NZ for "restaurant"
Shelob (Score:2)
The're not lizards! (Score:5, Interesting)
The tuatara isn't actually a lizard (any more than a crocodile is). They're pretty neat reptiles -- as a poster notes below, they have a "third eye" (they're not unique in this regard, some iguana species do as well, but not as well-developed as the tuatara's) -- and they require cold temperatures. Non-New Zealand zoos that get tuatara have to have triple cooling methods.
WETA, WETA, WETA (Score:2)
I'm telling you, it's all a huge scam, an experiment to push us and see at what point we realize it's all a reality game. Right? Right!?
I... I wanna work there
Not getting it (Score:4, Funny)
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Robot sex (Score:3, Funny)
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If people start dating robots, they won't feel the need to do bizarre and outrageous things in order to impress the opposite sex (or, in some cases, the same sex). As a result, human progress will come to an end, and society will stagnate!
It's Weta, not WETA - an insect, not an acronym. (Score:2, Informative)
A weta is a big fuck off insect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weta [wikipedia.org]
Also, it's pronounced Wet-a. Not Weeta.
WETA? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Uncanny Valley Problem (Score:2)
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If they could somehow make it a ninja and/or a pirate, they could win at the Internet. (Without even playing!)
What'll happen? (Score:2)
She'll bite his nuts off. (Maybe a few of his bolts as well...)
What's that buzzing sound? (Score:3, Funny)
The same thing, I suspect, that happens with human females:
She'll be very satisfied, until the batteries die.
WETA is for software.. (Score:2)
To me this is like asking Oracle to make an iPoodle.
What happens if the female discovers the Robot? (Score:2)
I haven't read the article yet but... (Score:4, Funny)
I just want to say that this is the coolest Slashdot headline I've seen in a while. All it needs is proper capitalization and punctuation:
And for best results, do a Magnus Pike impersonation when reading it.
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It would be so, if... (Score:4, Informative)
The fact is, those animals evolved (via natural selection, survival of the fittest, etc) to live in, say, a jungle, not in a place where jungles are razed down and replaced with either a concrete nightmare or with farms to produce biodiesel/ethanol/whatever. Evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years, and those animals just don't get that to adapt to the new environment.
Even something as apparently benign as putting a road through their habitat can screw those animals big time, because they just didn't evolve the sense to look out for cars coming at 100 mph. Sure, they _might_ evolve that sense in another 100-200 thousand years, but they might not survive that long.
And then there's stuff where humans deliberately mess with the balance there. E.g., some wise guy decided to introduce rabbits to Australia, but without predators they multiplied like rabbits (if you pardon the pun), and squeezed the native equivalent (the Bilby) into near-extinction. E.g., then some wise guy introduced foxes, but then these multiplied like rabbits too because the native fauna just hadn't evolved the instincts to run away from a predator. So whole species were nothing but fox chow suddenly. And the rabbits just proved a little extra meal, helping the foxes pretty much overrun Australia.
It's just not the environment in which those animals evolved. We're changing the rules and the game there, and the animals just don't have the time to evolve a defense. The half a century it took european foxes to spread across Australia is just a tiny blip at evolutionary time scales. It's not survival of the fittest, it's a massacre.
It's, if you will, like filling your room with chlorine gas and then saying "ah, wtf, you should have evolved to the new environment. If you didn't, hey, not everyone must survive." Evolution just doesn't work that way.
And then there are species which the humans actively hunted. It's damn hard to evolve a defense against a species with rifles in the first place, especially since it's not a modification of an existing threat. And we've had guns, for, what? Maybe half a millenium? (And guns which also have a decent range and/or accuracy, for at most two centuries.) Evolution just doesn't work that fast.
If you want a species where hunting them was senseless too, take the Dodo. It was a harmless bird whose meat tasted bad too. It was perfectly adapted for its original habitats, but wasn't prepared for massive deforestation and being hunted. Not only it was hunted to provision ships quickly anyway (bad tasting meat is better than no meat, after all) and by the refugees, there are reports of colonists killing them with sticks and stones just for fun. You know, the, "haw haw, lookit the dumb bird who's too stupid to run away" kind of fun. It went extinct pretty fast.
That's really the whole point of these preservation efforts. It's species which we already know will go extinct if noone protects them, because we changed the rules of the game too fast for them to evolve.
Parent
Just as an extra random thought (Score:3, Insightful)
E.g., the defense of rabbits isn't being too fast for any fox. Part of the defense is the natural balance of it all: if the population of rabbits declines too much, some foxes starve to death too, so the population of rabbits gets a chance to rebound. So some _will_ survive anyway, it just happens that on the average it will be
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Other than that, pretty much noone ever said that those species will ever find their perfect environment or niche ever again. They're kept, pretty much, as museum pieces. It's not survival of the fittest, and that's pretty much what I was saying too. We already know we're fit enough to wipe them out.
Pretty much that's all that that conservation is: keeping bits of Earth as museums where we can still see what li
Re:pineal gland (Score:4, Informative)
Widipedia [wikipedia.org] does not refer to it as vestigial, it gives some possible functions:
"Its purpose is unknown, but it may be useful in absorbing ultraviolet rays to manufacture vitamin D,[7] as well as to determine light/dark cycles, and help with thermoregulation.[8] Of all extant tetrapods, the parietal eye is most pronounced in the tuatara. The parietal eye is part of the pineal complex, another part of which is the pineal gland, which in tuatara secretes melatonin at night.[8] It has been shown that some salamanders use their pineal body to perceive polarised light, and thus determine the position of the sun, even under cloud cover, aiding navigation."
it is interesting that the pineal gland is thought to be a vestigal third eye.
Neither is the pineal gland [wikipedia.org] thought to be vestigial. The reference to the "third eye" in the "Mythologies, cultures and philosophies" section.
there is a clear relation between visualisation/consciousness and an eye.
A relationship between visualisation and eyes? You don't say!
Parent
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