wikimaze

BUGS could be the key to building plastic pals who are fun to be with.

Top boffins, backed by EU cash, think that robots could be developed using the collective intelligence of social insects.

New Boffin magazine had a chat with Alan Winfield, who emerged from his smoke filled lab at the University of the West of England, Bristol where he has been trying to develop both the hardware and software to have swarms of relatively simple robots work together.

Dubbed the Symbrion project, it is based on the idea that like social insects, the robots can show intelligence that is greater than the sum of their parts.

Winfield thinks that such intelligent swarms could even assemble into virtual doubles of people. So far boffins have carefully controlling and predicting all the variables and behaviours of what they build. However there is a certain amount of 'letting go' as see what happens when experimenting with swarm intelligence.

If they get it off the ground it means that geek-beloved fantasy writer Terry Pratchett's computer Hex, which was based around an ant farm, might actually be prophecy. By Nick Farrell