Swarm Robot Immune System? 47
schliz writes "Researchers are investigating large swarms of up to 10,000 miniature robots which can work together to form a single, artificial life form. A resulting artificial immune system is expected to be able to detect faults and make recommendations to a high-level control system about corrective action — much like how a person's natural immune system is able to cope with unfamiliar pathogens."
Battle Bots.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Don't they know they are unstoppable? (Score:4, Interesting)
That being said, you cannot rule out that it used to code for stuff, and that it is one mutation away from coming back into play (if you move around the 'start' and 'stop' within a genome, you can reintroduce what was previously 'junk' DNA). However, it is also likely that that DNA is no longer intact because it has not been evaluated for fitness recently (not being part of an individual means that individuals with 'bad' genes in this area can still effectively reproduce).
Re:Don't they know they are unstoppable? (Score:5, Interesting)
Although the parent post is quite cheesy the analogy is has a true core:
If you want to stop something flexible and adaptive the means has to be adaptive to.
That holds true for HIV and anti-AIDS medicine and it would hold true for a swarm of robots. You would either have to get them by one hit or take a swarm-like or a viral approach. Quite interesting task actually.