Prey

Recently I visited the Chattahoochee Valley Regional Library System (the North Columbus branch, to be exact) and borrowed some books. One was entitled Prey and was written by Michael Crichton. It was a science fiction novel based on the idea of Nanotechnology and Nanobiology someday combining, and proved to be very interesting. In the book, a company named Xymos planned to manufacture nanorobots (each equipped with a simple camera) ,1000th of the width of a human hair in size, that could all work together to create a very detailed image. This "robot camera swarm" was going to be used to spy on and study an enemy during war. However, the government cut funding when Xymos found out that in high winds, the nanorobots couldn't stay together in a swarm because they were small and easily blown apart. So, to solve the problem, Xymos purposefully released a swarm of the robots into the wild, so that the swarm would "evolve"(not in a literal way), learning and improving itself in order to overcome the difficulty.

(to be continued in my next post!)