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A comment on Biomimicry: How Designers Are Learning from the Natural World. Parent comment

Re:Biomimicry: How Designers Are Learning from the Natural W... by robotresearcher on Saturday November 11, 2017 @06:10PM (#15678716)
What do you mean 'no'? It's an empirical fact that very talented designers considered flapping wing flying machines, before they had the information that we have now. They were not 'overly simplistic' except in deep hindsight.
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Re:Biomimicry: How Designers Are Learning from the Natural W... by laretluval on Saturday November 11, 2017 @06:22PM (#15678743)
We aren't done designing flying machines. Maybe it will turn out that when we have sophisticated enough control mechanisms and materials, flapping will turn out to be the way to go after all.

Of course natural evolution has found only local minima in the fitness landscape, but as a designer it's been running its algorithm a lot longer than humans have. Its local minima may well be better than ours, and so worth trying to imitate.

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Re:Biomimicry: How Designers Are Learning from the Natural W... by robotresearcher on Saturday November 11, 2017 @06:36PM (#15678804)
Refer to the grandparent post as to why large flapping machines are unlikely.

This thread is so weird.

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