National Public Radio
Robert Krulwich
The video above is movie technology, something dreamed up by a screenwriter who imagined it while sitting at a cafe somewhere, far from facts, engineers and common sense—Except it isn’t! To my astonishment, there’s a lab at MIT working on smart cubes, and to my double-astonishment, they look very much like the cubes in the movie, and triple-astonishing, what MIT’s Daniela Rus and Kyle Gilpin plan to do with their cubes is queerer and more fantastic than the movie version. Plus, they’ve already started.
Robert Krulwich
The video above is movie technology, something dreamed up by a screenwriter who imagined it while sitting at a cafe somewhere, far from facts, engineers and common sense—Except it isn’t! To my astonishment, there’s a lab at MIT working on smart cubes, and to my double-astonishment, they look very much like the cubes in the movie, and triple-astonishing, what MIT’s Daniela Rus and Kyle Gilpin plan to do with their cubes is queerer and more fantastic than the movie version. Plus, they’ve already started.
You fill a bag with these little intelligent grains, and then you drop in ... oh, it could be anything—a hammer, a doll house version of a chair—and then you shake. That’s all you do ... shake.
What happens is the sand gets bumped around, and eventually the little grains get wedged up against the hammer inside. The hammer is now covered, on all sides, by sand. Here’s the beauty part: Each grain of sand that’s touching the hammer maps its little border, and when all the grains communicate, together they create a perfect silhouette of a hammer.
What happens is the sand gets bumped around, and eventually the little grains get wedged up against the hammer inside. The hammer is now covered, on all sides, by sand. Here’s the beauty part: Each grain of sand that’s touching the hammer maps its little border, and when all the grains communicate, together they create a perfect silhouette of a hammer.
And then (I should say “AND THEN!” because this is so surprising) ... Kyle Gilpin thinks he can get his bits of sand to send messages to the rest of the sand in the bag—loose sand, not near the hammer. The message is: “Copy this!” And the new grains will create a perfect copy of the hammer!
So now we’ve got two hammers in blocks of sand sitting in the bag, the original and the copy, and then (no, let me say AND THEN! ... ), a command is given to “Let go!” And all of the grains that aren’t being hammers fall away, leaving two distinct hammers inside in a pile of loose sand. You can then open the bag, reach in and pull out the original hammer and a perfect, sand-built copy.
Or if you like, you can put in a little hammer, and have the smart sand give you a bigger one. When you are done with the hammer, you can drop it back in the bag and give it the ”Disassociate“ command, and it will go back to sand.
So now we’ve got two hammers in blocks of sand sitting in the bag, the original and the copy, and then (no, let me say AND THEN! ... ), a command is given to “Let go!” And all of the grains that aren’t being hammers fall away, leaving two distinct hammers inside in a pile of loose sand. You can then open the bag, reach in and pull out the original hammer and a perfect, sand-built copy.
Or if you like, you can put in a little hammer, and have the smart sand give you a bigger one. When you are done with the hammer, you can drop it back in the bag and give it the ”Disassociate“ command, and it will go back to sand.
