

Sony's robotic dogs are dying a slow and heartbreaking death - anigbrowl
http://gizmodo.com/sonys-robotic-dogs-are-dying-a-slow-and-heartbreaking-d-1712160637

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anigbrowl
It's not really surprising, but many of the comments on the original article*
focus on the relationship with the physical device _qua_ inanimate object. But
while the devices are running to part supply problems, the loss suffered is
not the object itself but the uniquely developed pattern of the robot's
adaptation to its owner; I think it is not too much to call this pattern a
personality, even if it is a simple one. As we know, quite simple algorithms
can give rise to very complex and chaotic behavior.

If the youngest one was made a decade ago one presumes those patterns are
stored only in some sort of battery-backed memory. One wonders whether they
can be archived in some fashion. It's very odd to me that we haven't seen any
similar consumer products, though perhaps the combination of high cost and the
recession explain why. Given the progress of mobile technology one could
construct much more elaborate and responsive robot companions today than when
Aibo was on sale, and I wonder why nobody seems to be exploring that space.
For anyone who does, this offers something to think about.

* from the NYT. It was posted here a a few days ago but got ignored, unfortunately.

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sebastianavina
my guess is that it uses an eeprom chip... fair easy to extract the adaptation
data, but to interpret the data and emulate the original programming of the
aibo you would need to do a lot of reverse engineering...

sony of course could open source aibo, and we could load it on an arduino and
build better aibos...

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dang
Discussed at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9170238](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9170238).

