'Programmable matter' one day could transform itself into all kinds of look-alikes
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05136/505033.stm

IBM’s Blue Brain project simulates a “rat brain”
http://www.corticalcolumn.com/2007/11/14/ibms-blue-brain-project-simulates-a-rat-brain/
Let's cut straight to the numbers: We represented a rat-scale cortical model (55 million neurons, 442 billion synapses) in 8TB memory of a 32,768-processor BlueGene/L Dharmendra Modha of IBM's Blue Brain project presented these results yesterday at the Supercomputing 2007 Conference in a paper titled "Anatomy of a Cortical Simulator." (pdf) This is by far the largest simulation in the history of computational neuroscience, trumping their previous mouse-scale model ...

http://ccsl.mae.cornell.edu/research/selfmodels/
Robotic Introspection: Self Modeling

Competition: Simple Systems - Complex Capacities
http://archplus.net/index.php?s=projekte&c=184

chembots
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/06/drone-maker-wil.html
http://www.darpa.mil/BAA/baa07-21mod2.html

Neural Nets simulation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U5_A4eNzCE

- - -
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=Neural%20Nets%20simulation&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=iv

Leonardo ISAST invites you to a meeting of the Leonardo Art/Science community. See below for location and agenda.
http://www.scaruffi.com/leonardo/may2008.html

SCULPTURE DESIGNS and MATH MODELS
by Carlo H. Séquin
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~sequin/SCULPTS/sequin.html

http://www.princeton.edu/~icouzin/index.htm

Selected news articles
New York Times Feature Article From ants to people, an instict to swarm
Edge.org Ants have algorithms
Science Perspectives: locust marching bands.
Science Special Section: movement ecology.
Nature News and Views: cannibal crickets.
Science Editor's Choice: army ant traffic organisation.

Digital organism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_organism

Evolved Virtual Creatures
http://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html

New Artificial Organism with Advanced Group Intelligence: A Swarm of 10,000 Miniature Robots
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/03/swarm-robotics.html

ITSX: to urcite,..jak reverse, tak naopak :)
to kombinovani je prave dulezity, imho
prijde mi lepsi udelat vic specializovanych botu nez jednoho universalniho, abys dostal komplexnejsi robotickej system
proto jsou v symbiontovi ty ctyrnozky pro stromovity skeletonovy konstrukce a cervici pro vic flexibilni masu, svaly apod..
ale nevim, no... ja tohle fakt neumim simulovat :(

ALERT: tihle transformeri vypadaji dost flexibilne a pohyblive - mozna kdyby se zkombinovali jeste z nejakou jinou skupinou robotu - treba na skelet a podpurne prvky ...ale mam pocit ze by byl na vyrobu potreba reverse engineering :)) nebo jsou ti japonci tak kamardsti?:)

treba u toho dodecahedron je velkej problem, ze se roboti uvnitr nemuzou hybat
http://www.pandragon.com/polyhedra/avi/rd2.avi

http://www2.parc.com/spl/projects/modrobots/
Modular Reconfigurable Robotics is an approach to building robots for various complex tasks. Instead of designing a new and different mechanical robot for each task, you just build many copies of one simple module. The module can't do much by itself, but when you connect many of them together you get a system that can do complicated things. In fact, a modular robot can even reconfigure itself -- change its shape by moving its modules around -- to meet the demands of different tasks or different working environments.