Forgot your password?

typodupeerror

Crowdsourced evolution of 3D printable objects->

Submitted by
JimmyQS
JimmyQS writes "The Cornell Creative Machines Lab, which brought us chatbots debating God and unicorns, has developed Endlessforms.com, a site using evolutionary algorithms and crowdsourcing to design objects that can be 3D printed in materials such as silver, steel or silicone. MIT's Technology Review says "The rules EndlessForms uses to generate objects and their variants resemble those of developmental biology—the study of how DNA instructions unfold to create an entire living organism. The technology is 'very impressive,' says Neri Oxman, director of the MIT Media Lab's Mediated Matter research group. She believes the user-friendliness of the evolutionary approach could help drive the broader adoption of 3-D printing technologies, similar to how easy-to-use image editors fueled the growth of digital photography and graphic manipulation. Oxman [notes] that this could ultimately have an impact on design similar to the impact that blogs and social media have had on journalism, opening the field to the general public." The New Scientist has a quick video tour and describes how the same technology can evolve complex, artificially intelligent brains and bodies for robots that can eventually be 3D printed."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Basic probability maths (Score 1) 97

by locster (#28359591) Attached to: Renowned Geneticist Analyzes Consumer DNA Tests

Clearly the statistical analyses' are wrong for at least two of those companies. The prior probability of risk for a given disease is 'average', and if you don't test enough polymorphisms or if the correlations are weak then it remains average. Trouble is you can't make a business case on selling such weak information, so there's an incentive to spice up the summary info they provide.

Comment: Re:well thats more just the processor... (Score 1) 143

by locster (#26298193) Attached to: How Small Can Computers Get? Computing in a Molecule

True, and you're also one software/hardware bug away from creating the infamous grey goo - or at the very least killing everyone on the planet without creating a grey goo. I'm not sure if Kurzweil has ever addressed this specific issue, I guess he would say that biological life would be defunct at that point and we'd all hav either uploaded our minds to an artificial substrate or will have been wiped out and replaced by some machine intelligence. Happy new year!

Comment: Re:well thats more just the processor... (Score 5, Insightful) 143

by locster (#26266807) Attached to: How Small Can Computers Get? Computing in a Molecule

OK but what if you want to put them inside nanobots designed to target and kill cancer cells or a zillion other applications that are made possible by smaller and less power hungry computation? Smaller also means more powerful computers at the 'classic' scale, for which we know there is demand for right now by way of the very existence of supercomputers.

Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill.

Working...