Computing & AI · the experiment
Get twenty robots through the lunar night
354 hours of night, a heater that stops when the store runs dry, death below −40 °C. First leave one robot alone under the open sky, then huddle all twenty.
1 · Get one lone robot through the night
Beginner
During training, what were the twenty robots scored on?
A lone robot sees the whole sky: its exposure is 1. Set its stored energy as tightly as you can: it must see dawn above −40 °C, with at most 2% more energy than needed.
2 · Huddle all twenty
Alone, a robot loses 1.92 W. With exposure χ, it loses 1.92 W × (0.275 + 0.725 χ).
Intermediate
At the swarm's average exposure, χ = 0.23, how much does it lose?
Twenty robots in the densest packing share the exposure equally: 0.231 each. Find the smallest stored energy that gets them all to dawn, to within 2%.
3 · Save the most exposed one
Each robot now has only 155.6 pcm-h, the learned swarm's threshold. The others last the night: everything rides on the most exposed robot, marked with a chevron, and on its average exposure through the night.
Expert
During training, what brought that worst robot from 0.71 down to 0.26?
Lower its average exposure until it sees dawn. It cannot go below the swarm average, 0.23.
4 · Scale up to forty
Trained on twenty robots, the same networks run forty robots without retraining.
Expert
With forty, each robot needs 8% less energy. Why?
Night survived
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