Tuesday 27 December 2011

Then imitate the action of the pigeon

Let slip the birds of war
Cyberneticzoo looks at the ultimate in doomsday weaponry:  The pigeon bomb.

3 comments:

Sergej said...

Um..., these pigeon bites I had on Crispin's day?

Cthel said...

I must confess, this system always struck me as a triumph of ingenuity over "common sense", and I mean that in a good way. Rather like the "bat bomb" program, it's a prime example of how valuable an unusual viewpoint on a problem can be.

Not that the unusual solution is always a good idea, but it generally points you down an line of thought you would never have embarked upon otherwise.

In this case, I think the important innovation is the idea of redundancy in the guidance system - in this case, using 3 pigeons and averaging out their inputs. Sounds remarkably similar to the way the shuttle's fly-by-wire system uses multiple computers running the same software to generate control commands.

eon said...

Cthel;

Absolutely true. Of course, the ORCON system probably had its own version of "software conflicts", since a major problem would be training the pigeons not to peck each other; they get irritable when confined in a harness.

And of course, the small problem of dealing with the pigeons', err, "exhaust products" in the guidance package.

;-)

cheers

eon