Voting Robots

Engadget: Take me to your robot leader

From Engadget comes this leap forward in robotic sentience. Seems that someone's gotten a set of robots to do distributed decision making. Yep, the robots are ready to group together and elect a leader. I refuse to make any electronic voting jokes: it's too easy.

To quote:

The Robotic Open Control (ROC) software essentially operates by allowing the robots to elect a leader to make critical decisions at crunch times.

OK, I lied. I can't resist.

If Diebold gets a hold of the software, the robots will vote, then a random number will be assigned, and whichever robot matches that total will win the election. All further elections will be held after the rest of the robots drive off a cliff and the leader decides he's wrong.

This will of course become the new system for Atlanta's light rail train MARTA, which will be expounded on by Georgia's Secretary of State Cathy Cox as "perfect" and "the wave of the future", despite the fact all of the trains will elect to secede from Atlanta and create "Marta Springs", only take 50 dollar bills as tokens, and refuse to go inside the perimeter.