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The Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have detailed research into algorithms that could enable “smart sand,” which are self-sculpting reconfigurable robotic cubes that send messages among themselves to re-create a three-dimensional object.
There are engineering challenges to get the cubes down to a size akin to grains of sand and still function as expected, but the team says that the core functionality is in place.
Originally posted by listerofsmeg
lets just hope they don't give sand the ability to replicate otherwise we may have a problem.
...You tell one piece of "sand" what you are recreating, and it can tell the rest of them what to do.
It seems like every week we reach into the sci-fi category, and pull something into the science fact category.