YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Best thing is, you can physically build this with a few discrete analog components! Search terms: light-bot, or light following robot. You can try to create swarms adding a light to the rear end of your robot

Check out Valentino Braitenberg's vehicles. It's one of my favourite books ever.

Read this and instantly though about Elmer and Elsie, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_and_Elsie_(robots)

A similar mechanism is how lactobacillus actually find food even though their motor propels them in random directions.

They have sensors for the concentration of food and basically stop moving when it's good enough and start when it's low.

Growing up I tinkered with BEAM robotics. It's a philosophy of design that begins with these types of very simple reactive circuits usually from scavenged parts. It's nice to see someone break down the effect of different variables in the design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics

> If you saw creatures behaving like this in the wild, you might attribute some rudimentary intelligence to them.

> But we’ve just shown you how this apparent intelligence arises from the bottom up, with just four neurons and two connections. There’s no magic here. In this view, behavior emerges from neural circuits.

Isn't the conclusion here that very simple behaviors like the sparks are intelligent? I would say even a single neuron has some tiny amount of intelligence, and what the author means by "no magic" and "emergent behavior" is just a different perspective that minimizes it.