A heck of a party!


Last night’s unveiling of A Field Guide to Genetic Programming was a huge success! We had one of the poster “stalls” with 50 copies of the book that we’d purchased from Lulu as our initial “print run”. We were wearing cool t-shirts sporting that wonderful cover, had the nice poster shown to the right, and even had spiffy postcards with the cover to give away.

The book was a big hit with the Evo* crowd, and we sold out the full set of 50 pretty quickly. Lots of folks had us autograph their copies, many of which are now destined to be collector’s items with the signatures of all three of the authors. Some even have the signature of Tyler Hutchison, who did the nifty cover art for us and helped a lot with the roll-out.

There were tons of photos taken at our booth, including candids of us signing and working the crowd, and posed shots with our cool Field Guide shirts. People have promised to send us photos and links, so check back in the next week or two for some of the finest in EC book release amateur photojournalism! (And if you’ve got a photo from the event, or a nifty shot of your copy in its place of pride on your bookshelves, please pass it along.)

As mentioned before, the book is now officially released and available to any and all via lulu.com, both in an inexpensive printed form (what we were selling last night) and as a free downloadable PDF.

So go check it out – 50 whole Field Guide fans can’t be wrong!

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One of the best walking robot demos I’ve ever seen

Wow – this is quite amazing. About mid-way through Big Dog (a defense project from Boston Dynamics) slips on some glaze ice and recovers without actually falling down, which involves some super cool real-time responses. The video is long-ish, but definitely worth the investment.

I’d love to know what the burn out rate for the joints and motors are. One of the amazing things about biological organisms is that we can balance muscles against each other to hold a position without wearing ourselves out. Many walking robots, on the other hand, end up exerting so much force in simply maintaining their position that they tend to burn out key components really quickly. Given the responses and forces involved in Big Dog’s movement and balance, you’d think they’d have this problem in spades. If these trials go on for any length of time, however, they presumably managed to handle this to some degree. Their web site says “BigDog’s legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next.”; the idea of recycling energy back into the motion (use it instead of fight it) certainly looks promising.

The research is being funded by DoD money, with the hope that robots like this could help carry material in the field. I could imagine nice civilian applications, however. An infirm person in Morris, for example, might be capable of walking to the grocery store, but not capable of carrying a shopping load home. A smaller, electric version of this could be a nice alternative to cars in that situation.

Thanks to Sub-Evil for the pointer!

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