Gizmodo Australia » hunting

Warning: Robots Have Learned Deception, Will Kill Us All

Dan Nosowitz — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:40:00 +0000

Not to get all alarmist with you people, but a group of robots in Switzerland have learned to lie to each other about the location of an object representing food, which almost certainly means we’re all going to die. Soon.

The robots started out hunting for an object designated “food” as a group, and if one discovered the food object before the others, it signalled its fellows with a blue light. But researchers, those meddling fools that will bring about the downfall of civilisation, mixed and matched the food-finding software of the best hunters, and then gave these super-hunters the ability to signal or not signal to the rest of the group at will.

We might expect these super-hunters to merely neglect to signal the group when food is found, to keep it all to themselves, but they’re far more clever than we thought: They actually sent out false signals to lure the other robots away from food. This is the beginning of the end, people. [BotJunkie]

Pioneering Orangutan Pries First Hunting Tool Ever Out of Heston’s Cold Dead Hands

Gizmodo US Edition — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 06:00:00 +0000

Hide the china, bananas, children—whatever. I guess it doesn’t really matter, because for the first time ever an orangutan was spotted in the wild using a gadget to hunt. In this case the tool was a spear, and the intrepid primate apparently picked up the skill by watching locals fish with spears along the Gohong River in Borneo, on the island of Kaja.

Lucky for we homo sapiens, this orangutan was not as skilled as the fishermen, and could only snare fish that were hooked on fishing lines. Orangutans are incredible masters of mimicry, however, so you know it’s only a matter of time before Charlton Heston himself will have to fight his way back from the abyss to save us all. [Daily Mail via The Drawn Cutlass via Neatorama]

Bazooka Camo ATV Speakers For Hunters: Because Deer Love Loud Country Music

Sean Fallon — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:00:27 +0000

These 6.5″ Bazooka “Outdoor Tubbie” speakers are hilarious on numerous levels. First off, they are designed for hunters—which is why they are camouflaged. The idea is to hook them to your ATV roll bar, which I can only presume is useful for those interested in hunting wild game while blaring music. Uh, I don’t know much about hunting, but I do know that thundering out of the brush, guns a’ blazin’ with duelling banjos blaring from your ATV is unlikely to result in a successful kill. However, if you are interested in picking them up, you can do so starting this March for US$449.95. [Product Page via AudioJunkies]