The instructions are simple: make an artificial fly as close in size to an actual fly as possible. The entry that's the smallest and replicates a fly, everything about it, will win... well, the future, because the technologies you'd have to create to do this would be worth a lot more than some one time pile of cash, no matter how big it was.
The contest wouldn't end when a fly sized, fully functional analog fly won the contest, the shrinking down could continue. To win, your flybot must:
1- Be able to fly navigate sufficiently to avoid being swatted using visual and other sensory mechanism.
2- Be able to take air samples and process them to find fuel supplies.
3- Be able to gather and process these fuel supplies.
4- Be able to seek out other roboflies and reproduce.
And all this computing power on a the head of a pin.
From an article I read years ago:
"Flies can therefore process a vast amount of information about proper motion and movement in their environment in real time - a feat that no computer, and certainly none the size of a fly's brain, can hope to match."
But forget about the brain, the motors you need to fly around changing wing angles in microseconds, the chemical processing system and reproduction? Not in our lifetime.
I've suggested this before, we might consider dumping the digital world and start emulating nature's analog/electrochemical approach to making everything we create look dumb. (Let's not compare a computer to a human brain. A human brain can make a computer, a computer when asked to make a human brain would sit there with one of those spinning wheels for 15 minutes before saying "Please Try Rebooting Me".
The first entries might be the size of a desk and incredibly dangerous when they started flying, (which would be a bonus) but each step towards miniaturization might bring with it new discoveries and technologies.
I'm calling this an Olympic style event because there would be many different categories, the aeronautic, the chemical, the analog computing, there might even be a blurred line between cellular biology and current electronics technology. Cellular analog microchips for instance.
Progress could be made a bit at a time until we basically start creating analog life that's so advanced life itself has branched into a 3rd kingdom.
It would be a fascinating journey.
Credits: doctorremulac3 of HalfBakery.
