Robot Dreams

Korea is starting development of a collection of robots to do various public support functions:

By the 2010s, Korea is expecting to see robots assisting police and the military, patrolling the neighborhoods and going on recon missions on the battlefield.

They are taking a route which seems obviously as a first step into the common SciFi theme of remote controlled armies of robots. Instead of going the fully autonomous route, they are planning to do wireless control of the robots from a central AI system through their vast wireless network. This is one of the first thoughts I had when I was reading about the Lego NXT toy which has a wireless connection. How cool would it be to move the smart control aspects to your home PC.

The latest Game Developer touches on a subject that I get asked about frequently. The when, how, and why of optimizing programs. In the Mature Optimization article Mick West discusses the very common mistake programmers make of not considering optimization until the very last step of programming, if at all. This stemming from a nugget of wisdom often quoted and misquoted:

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil." [Hoare] [Knuth]

© The LEGO GroupIt's always fun to see where robotics show up, and one of the most common places where I see the makings of robots are in toys. In this years CES Lego announced another robot toy in their MINDSTORMS™ series:

Building upon the success of the globally-renowned Robotics Invention System, the next generation of LEGO MINDSTORMS makes it quicker and easier for robot creators to build and program a working robot in just 30 minutes.

Although this is clearly a "grown-up" toy it won't be long before kids not only regularly play with such smart toys — But start expecting them everywhere to do everything. Wired has some details behind the toy. And LEGO sponsored NXT blog promises to keep filling us in the continued growth of this particular robot toy.

Once upon a time some people asked me if I had weblog. Some time later others suggested I start a weblog. And a bit later I said I would. That was more than a year ago and like many things that are not a priority I procrastinated. Well it's a new year so it's a time to make up for previous procrastination lapses. So here we are in this new blog.

Since I am not a big talker I've recruited the help of my business partner, and long time coworker and friend, John Welch to help in filling in. We are responsible for running Redsfhit Software, Inc. where we have the luxury, and hence pain, of both doing what we want and what others pay us to do. I'm not going to bore you with what we each do personally and professionally, that comes later.

For now we are taking this blog space to comment on topics that interest us. This includes many things but the hope is to comment on topics relating to the branch of technology that will eventually bring us the Science Fiction conceptualization of robots. Hence the name of this web site. Not that we'll restrict ourselves to just that topic, though large it is, so expect other topics to range from technology, artificial intelligence, software development, game development, and of course we'll stray into non-technical subjects of politics, photography, cooking, and whatever else that comes to mind.

Enjoy your visit.