The second paragraph provides an eerie analogue to what this band is like, the concept of asynchronicity plus autonomy. My favorite point is that the parts can all do their separate thing, but are only effective when they come together and work off of each other.

From Vanderbilt Engineering website:
The Intelligent Machine Architecture (IMA) is a software architecture for designing a service robot. Our design process in IMA is to decompose the system into a set of atomic agents. We use the term "atomic" agent because researchers often use the term "agent" to describe an intelligent software entity. Instead, our atomic agents are not, in general, intelligent. They are more similar to the agents described by Minsky [Minsky 1985]; other authors refer to such simple agents as "actors." The IMA is an agent-based software system that permits the concurrent execution of software agents on separate machines while facilitating extensive inter-agent communication. Within the context of IMA, an atomic agent is one element of a domain-level system description that tightly encapsulates all aspects of that element, much like the concept of object in object-oriented systems. The atomic agent serves as a superstructure for everything the software system knows or does relating to an element of the robot, tasks or environment. IMA runs under Windows NT 4.0. Communication between atomic agents is handled transparently by DCOM, the Distributed Component Object Model. DCOM is a service of Windows NT, which allows remote objects to be treated as if they were local. IMA atomic agents can and do exist at different levels of abstraction - from low-level hardware interfaces, through behaviors and sequencers to high-level, autonomous, interactive entities.

The important features of IMA atomic agents are that they are asynchronous, autonomous computing modules. By autonomous, we mean each atomic agent executes as a separate operating system process. It can exist and perform its functions even if no other agents are present. However, in most cases, atomic agents need the services of other agents to do something useful. For example, consider an agent that encapsulates a sensory-motor behavior. It expects data from one or more sensor hardware atomic agents, and produces commands for one or more actuator hardware atomic agents. While this atomic agent can execute independently of the sensor and actuator atomic agents, it would be producing no answers or "wrong answers" (since it has no sensor input data), depending on its implementation.

Duh!

is ima robot also involved in graffiti ? i keep seeing the red spray painted \" tags \" in hollywood . and tracked em back to imarobot.com . i have to assume theyre related ?

but why do vandalism in your own city ?

I have never even heard of that...don't suppose you have any pics of it? Or describe what the tags look like.

This concept translates into everything like every component in the Space Shuttle being built in different regions for different purposes, then being assembled in one place to execute one mission each component doing what it was designed for. Same theory going on with the Space Station right now. It's a long, and arduous effort, but each $390 million girder is serving a specific purpose to facilitate better maintenance in the future for a higher purpose. Same with body parts etc...

That's some good thinking for 9:30am Neuwave!

What's up with these tags mentioned by Mr. Mcnugget? Are you just talking about "Ima" or is the tag something else?

I really don't think the guys in the band have time to deface Los Angeles. This just happens at their shows where they tear the place up.

If you can grab a digital shot of the tag post it up here.







[Edited on 10-10-2002 by Phobiac]

[Edited on 10-10-2002 by Phobiac]