Synthetic Relationships: Dear Letter

By Hongming Li, Zhiyan Wang

What makes a creature?

How can the electron product be called biological? According to Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, humans seem to be good at anthropomorphizing any stress response, meaning that simple feedback to the outside world can also give the little ESP-32 robot a specific personality. In the Project SYNTHETIC RELATIONSHIPS, we were asked to construct two electronic beings capable of perceiving some aspects of the environment around them. Use whatever sensors are necessary to create their "worldview". Then need to connect them into a network, Adafruit IO, that would enable them to communicate their findings and respond to the communications of their counterpart.

Hongming and I started from the character of the machine to conceive a behavior pattern specific to ESP-32, to consider what capabilities to give - different sensors - and to write a language, a crypto punk of the machine, that would allow ESP-32 to understand and describe the world of experience in its way.

Agents

Here's a tiny pair of Creatures that we create! They ought to have their idea and way of processing information.

In long-distance relationships, they keep sending Love Messages to each other every 20 seconds. Agent 1, who has a microphone sensor, will evaluate the surrounding sound level - the way he perceives the world, in 5 levels, and reports the information to the cloud, a cloud service where they can exchange info.

Agent 2 uses a PIR sensor to detect the world, too. If someone passes around, she will perceive the stimulus, and the higher the intensity of the trigger, the higher the level of information she will upload.

In a relationship, we don't stay by each other's side all the time. Agent 1 and Agent 2, too, respond to the highest-ranking message, rank S, and also go back to the previous message, from rank S to rank C, to rank B, to rank A.

The next thing they do is what they do best - they try to understand and recreate the scenario that the other person is experiencing.

Processing information

• Each agent collects and exchanges information. One contains motion using PIR, and one gathers sound using the microphone. Every 20 seconds, they analyze the data and rank the stimuli for upload.

• Agents will receive information from IO but just store them without 'Read.' Once a severe impact comes, agents will start to 'Read' all the information they receive.

• In the 'Read' processing, they will understand the information from the peer in their way. Microphone agent will express its understanding by LED array, and the PIR agent will communicate via Buzzer - similar to how their pair collects data, but not a simple retelling.