Brilliant idea for the week: teach the machines to find and talk to each other!

It's been a terribly busy week for us over here at C.M.A., literally fending off evil and crazy robots and such, but here is a gem to be aware of: MIT is teaching machines how to think to locate eachother. Hmmm.

MIT's Wireless Communications and Network Sciences Group are making gadgets talk directly to one another. But what's novel about their approach is that the devices aren't just saying where they think they are; they're broadcasting all the possibilities of where they might be:

Among their insights is that networks of wireless devices can improve the precision of their location estimates if they share information about their imprecision. Traditionally, a device broadcasting information about its location would simply offer up its best guess. But if, instead, it sent a probability distribution - a range of possible positions and their likelihood - the entire network would perform better as a whole.

By relying on cooperation amongst the devices themselves as opposed to a single, fixed infrastructure, a la GPS, the researchers have created networks of devices can locate themselves with reliability and sub-meter accuracy.

Unsurprising that as machines learn to find eachother (I'm sure learning to find where humans hide will be around the Singularity corner), they will do it better than we can.