> Maybe one day in the distant future (if we haven't annihilated each other first) we'll have the technology to built smart grains of sand. But it's seems pointless theorising about something that might just as easily be deprecated by some other fantasy device by our current technological capabilities.
Maybe. But I feel this isn't pointless - I find myself constantly returning to this topic whenever I follow seemingly unrelated avenues of idle curiosity (e.g. "how to build self-maintaining systems", "how to do in-orbit construction" , "how to get rid of household cleaning chores", "how to build a food replicator", "ooh isn't biotech kind of fun", etc.). I think we'll eventually start building "smart matter" at some scale. Might be nanometer. Might be millimeter. Might be meter. Each of those scales has its own physics regime, but I think the concepts behind self-organization will be common. And we're already working on those ideas when studying biology at molecular and cellular level.
> When I've looked this stuff up in the past I've found most of the time it was proprietary.
Do you remember any names? Might be that some of the research is released. Or maybe my employer has access.
> However I have seen papers doing similar work (in the sense that there is transferable logic) in a two dimensional fields, eg matrix reordering.
Thanks, I'll look it up.
The real problem with such research is it might work on a quadcopter with room for a chipset capable of relatively powerful real time compution (be that an off the shelf CPU or something more bespoke), but that doesn't scale down to the grain of sand level. At that point you'll want to offload as much computation overhead as you can. Which, again, brings me back to my original post.
Maybe one day in the distant future (if we haven't annihilated each other first) we'll have the technology to built smart grains of sand. But it's seems pointless theorising about something that might just as easily be deprecated by some other fantasy device by our current technological capabilities.
Anyhow, if you're after a paper on the actual calculations you'd run to convert a database of nearest neighbour coordinates into a matrix that can be used to instruct those robots, then I don't have anything directly to hand on that. When I've looked this stuff up in the past I've found most of the time it was proprietary. Maybe there is a paper I've missed. However I have seen papers doing similar work (in the sense that there is transferable logic) in a two dimensional fields, eg matrix reordering.