IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos; An arXiv paper argues that complex numbers are needed for quantum mechanics and proposes a confirmatory experiment, hence that complex numbers actually exist; Valve Software, maker of Steam, says that 7,000 Windows games can be played on Linux; An argument that ownership is the wrong metaphor for describing information and privacy rights; and a folding drone that can be used to survey old mines that are unsafe for humans

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Video Friday: Nanotube-Powered Insect Robots - This week, the IEEE Spectrum weekly selection of awesome robot videos includes these interesting videos:
- agile drones that look, act, and maneuver like actual insects from MIT, Harvard, and the City University of Hong Kong.
- A promo video for National Robotics Week, which will be celebrated from April 3 to April 11.
- A quadrotor drone navigates an obstacle course in a motion capture environment, described in this paper.
- A video of a free-swimming robot in the South China Sea. Described in Nature.
- and more...
Here are drones from VSwarm, flocking in an outdoor environment:

Do Complex Numbers Exist? - Sabine Hossenfelder joins an ongoing discussion that began with the preprint: Quantum physics needs complex numbers and continued with a blog post by Scott Aaronson. According to Hossenfelder, the paper found a particular form of quantum entanglement that can only be described with imaginary numbers (numbers that are built with the square root of -1, which doesn't exist as a real number). In areas of physics outside of quantum mechanics, complex numbers can be rearranged as reals, so the question of whether complex numbers exist doesn't matter, but in quantum mechanics this paper purports to demonstrate that complex numbers must exist. The intriguing thing is that the paper also proposes an experiment that, in principle, could prove the existence of complex numbers. So, Hossenfelder says there are basically two camps of people, "the shut-up and calculate camp" who don't care whether complex numbers exist or whether they're just a useful mathematical tool and another group of people who are bothered by the idea that quantum mechanics depends on the unobservable idea of complex numbers. This paper, she argues, is impactful for the second group of people because if they manage to demonstrate the existence of complex numbers then these people will need to accept that complex numbers exist or else they'll have to revamp quuantum mechanics. Of course, it's also possible that the experiment fails to verify the predictions of quantum mechanics, which would also have sweeping implications.

Here is the video:

PROTON HAS ENABLED 7000 WINDOWS GAMES TO RUN ON LINUX - Valve Software (maker of Steam) has announced that their Proton product has been integrated into Steam so that as many as 7,000 Windows games can be played on Linux just by hitting "Play". The article says that the number of Windows games will keep increasing because the success rate for new games to work "out of the box" has been holding steady at 50% for quite some time. For any new windows game, they say, "there’s a coin flip chance that it will work just as well on Linux". General limitations are that: movie files within games may not play as expected; multi-player might not work due to anti-cheat technologies; DRM can prevent games from launching; some games suffer from performance issues; and DX12 support is limited (but improving) in some games. -h/t OS news

Why data ownership is the wrong approach to protecting privacy - In this article, the Brookings Institute authors argue that data ownership is the wrong metaphor to think about privacy and information licensing. They argue that information is fundamentally different from a commodity that can be owned, and - as a result - that businesses and regulators shouldn't try to manage information as if it could be owned. Here is the crux of their argument:
The trouble is, it’s not your data; it’s not their data either. Treating data like it is property fails to recognize either the value that varieties of personal information serve or the abiding interest that individuals have in their personal information even if they choose to “sell” it. Data is not a commodity. It is information. Any system of information rights—whether patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property, or privacy rights—presents some tension with strong interest in the free flow of information that is reflected by the First Amendment.
Major arguments include: (i) that information is often generated by multiple parties, and the intersection of interests with each piece of information may be difficult or impossible to determine; and (ii) Even a strong property-rights system won't provide adequate privacy protections because people just "click through" licensing agreements without understanding them. In all, the article is interesting, but the conclusion is just a bunch of hand-waving:
Rather than trying to resolve whether personal information belongs to individuals or to the companies that collect it, a baseline federal privacy law should directly protect the abiding interest that individuals have in that information and also enable the social benefits that flow from sharing information.
-h/t Bruce Schneier

Folding Drone Can Drop Into Inaccessible Mines - Led by Headlight AI, a team of UK researchers have created a drone to inspect old mines that humans might be unable to reach safely. Named, Prometheus, the drone can enter a mine through a borehole a little larger than a football (i.e. soccer ball, I presume). Once inside the mine, the drone makes use of its extensible arms and payload of scanning equipment in order to map the mine and make future transit by humans safer. The design was published in the November issue of Robotics. Other drones exist that can fly underground, but they're generally limited by a need for a larger borehole or an inability to carry heavy scanning equipment. Prometheus' limitations include a relatively short flying ttime and an inability to perform tasks other than scanning. It has been used on test flights, but apparently not for real world, productive tasks.

Here is the video:

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