RE: [GZG] Stuart Murray's Games at GZG ECC IX

G'day,

Here to stir the age old mines in space question again.

For a long time I've liked the idea of mines representing fields of tiny
nodes. In nature today they had a piece on potential future sensor
networks. In particular they highlighted existing node usage where
glaciologists put down a dozen or so nodes to track what the glacier is
up to. Most importantly the nodes cooperate, and to quote tha article
(which was quoting a a scientist)

 "You can get the pods talking to each other, and deciding that nothing
much has happened recently as most of our readings have been the same,
so lets the rest of us go to sleep and save batteries, with one waking
us up if something starts happening," says Martinez.

Oceanographers here have used a similar technique for a few years now
and as far as we can tell some invertebrate swarms act in the same way
too.

This is what has attracted me to the idea about mine counters on the
table marking the position of a cloud of mines. I know some here don't
like the idea as they say the chatter between nodes would give them
away. Yes it may when mines are reaching the end of their lifetime or
when the field goes active because something of note bumped into it and
caused the sleeping nodes to "wake up". The later isn't an issue as then
the minefield is hopefully blowing things up (which would give away its
position anyway) and the former problem isn't a problem while the power
sources last (initially when minefields are young the watcher node may
just tap a nearest neighbour and quietly subside, which should minimise
detection).

Now after rambling on so long, basically my question boils down to. For
those in the audience who don't like that vision of a minefield (and
people like Noam who just don't like mines in 3D space fullstop can go
switch off now), given advances in batteries and distributed sensor nets
using this node-like behaviour, why can't minefields of the future use
them to?

Curious as ever ;)

Beth

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