… I'll start with an example from an Aboriginal community in Australia that I had the chance to work with. These are the Kuuk Thaayorre people. They live in Pormpuraaw at the very west edge of Cape York. What's cool about Kuuk Thaayorre is, in Kuuk Thaayorre, they don't use words like "left" and "right," and instead, everything is in cardinal directions: north, south, east and west.
And when I say everything, I really mean everything. You would say something like, "Oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg." Or, "Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit." In fact, the way that you say "hello" in Kuuk Thaayorre is you say, "Which way are you going?" And the answer should be, "North-northeast in the far distance. How about you?"
So imagine as you're walking around your day, every person you greet, you have to report your heading direction.
(Laughter)
But that would actually get you oriented pretty fast, right? Because you literally couldn't get past "hello," if you didn't know which way you were going. In fact, people who speak languages like this stay oriented really well.
They stay oriented better than we used to think humans could. We used to think that humans were worse than other creatures because of some biological excuse: "Oh, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales." No; if your language and your culture trains you to do it, actually, you can do it. There are humans around the world who stay oriented really well.
And just to get us in agreement about how different this is from the way we do it, I want you all to close your eyes for a second and point southeast.
(Laughter)
Keep your eyes closed. Point. OK, so you can open your eyes. I see you guys pointing there, there, there, there, there ... I don't know which way it is myself …
There is food (small static blue) that the good agents (green moving) are rewarded for being near, there are ‘forests’ (large green static) that hide agents inside from being seen, and there is a ‘leader adversary’ (dark red) that can see the agents at all times and can communicate with the other adversaries (light red) to help coordinate the chase. [GIF below: 2 good agents, 3 adversaries, 1 obstacle (large black), 2 foods, and 2 forests] ... the good agents reward, is -5 for every collision with an adversary, -2 x bound, +2 for every collision with a food, and -0.05 x minimum distance to any food. The adversarial agents are rewarded +5 for collisions and -0.1 x minimum distance to a good agent.
... in 1714, the British government passed the Longitude Act, which led to the formation of the Board of Longitude. The board offered a large monetary reward for an invention that would solve the problem of determining longitude ... John Harrison, an inventive London clockmaker, developed a friction-free clock that proved a superior method ... Harrison’s clock passed a series of tests and on a nine-week Caribbean journey, lost only 5 seconds, equating to 1.25 minutes of longitude.
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Fast-forward to 1959 when a joint effort between DARPA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory began to fine-tune the early explorers’ discoveries. TRANSIT, sponsored by the Navy and developed under the leadership of Dr. Richard Kirschner at Johns Hopkins, was the first satellite positioning system ... The TRANSIT system, which used six satellites (three for positioning and three as spares), was based on the finding that the Doppler shift could establish the location of the satellite in relation to the receiver station.
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In 1973, the Department of Defense () called for the creation of a joint program office to develop a unified navigation system. The resulting system, named the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System, successfully launched from Cape Canaveral in 1989. Twenty-three more satellites were later launched to complete the configuration.
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There are three components necessary for a GPS to work: ground stations that control the system, a configuration of satellites fitted with atomic clocks, and receivers carried by users. With all three of these components in place and operational, it was time for DARPA to focus on improving the receivers soldiers were using. One of the early receivers was the PSN-8 Manpack. Between 1988 and 1993, 1,400 of these units were produced and utilized by military personnel. However, these units proved to be cumbersome and impractical for military use. The units were large and weighed close to 50 pounds.
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