Forget Russian botnets or cryptocurrency spammers 鈥� the latest robots to join Twitter are chemists. By hooking up automated platforms to the internet and letting them chat on social media, researchers have shown that robots can work together to solve simple chemistry problems.
at the University of Glasgow and his team built two robots capable of mixing liquids through a system of pumps and analysing the results with a webcam hooked up to a small computer. The robots were physically separated, but able to communicate via their .
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The team tasked the robots with creating a dye of a particular blue hue, by mixing together two chemicals from a choice of three in different ratios, for a total of 117 combinations. The robots each picked a combination at random and the robots posted their results on Twitter. On average, sharing the results halved the time it took to find the right colour.
Cronin hopes that using this platform will encourage cross-border collaboration and allow labs to easily verify each other鈥檚 work.聽 鈥淚f the commands are so simple they can be sent as a tweet, then anyone will be able to understand them,鈥� he says.
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