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Jun. 1st, 2009 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
abigailbradyI have a Roomba! (a robotic vacuum cleaner)
It has been tested under supervision in all the dry rooms of the flat and it seems to work great, although it can get stuck under the cover of the sofabed.
I am a little sad to discover that it doesn't try to do mental mapping of the rooms it cleans, it just does simple behaviours tweaked for a good probability of 95% coverage. This isn't the future I was promised. (Mind, even 20 years ago watching Tomorrow's World, I was rather cynical about such robotic dreams, knowing what little I did about programming then... Wolfram Alpha is another in a long line of people solving the easy half of a problem and then assuming the difficult half will be just as quick.)
It has been tested under supervision in all the dry rooms of the flat and it seems to work great, although it can get stuck under the cover of the sofabed.
I am a little sad to discover that it doesn't try to do mental mapping of the rooms it cleans, it just does simple behaviours tweaked for a good probability of 95% coverage. This isn't the future I was promised. (Mind, even 20 years ago watching Tomorrow's World, I was rather cynical about such robotic dreams, knowing what little I did about programming then... Wolfram Alpha is another in a long line of people solving the easy half of a problem and then assuming the difficult half will be just as quick.)
