Giant Walky Things

Firstly a clunky walking thing living in London… worthy of note because it also breathes fire. Made out of a 2CV engine apparently. Brilliant

Ok, this one’s a small one, but it gets into this category a) because it’s a centipede, and b) because it’s steam powered.

Back to the big ones… big clunky walking thing racing a giant solar wheely thing.

Then… getting a little bit smarter, a US army thing for carrying heavy loads across rough terraine.

Looks like two skinny people facing each other, dieing for a piss to me, but there you go. This one probably cost so much that they could use the money to buy whatever it is that they’re supposed to be killing. Welcome to asymetrical warfare. Expensive linear vs cheap exponential.

And now from systrum to symphony. Theo Jansen has built an entire menagerie of wind powered beasties designed to walk along beaches, avoiding obstacles. He uses an evolutionary process where the winning characteristics of one generation are incorporated into the next. Really what he should be living is putting the plans up on Ponoko or Instructables to see what the collective imagination can throw back.

Still, utterly brilliant… you can sometimes tell that a design is right, because it’s beautiful.

(edit)

Although the nature of memetics is that the spores leap from mind to mind using the most minimal genotypes… and once something is on the internet, the originator loses control and the meme takes on a life of its own. There are now loads of lego ones on youtube.