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DaVinci Surgical Robot Plays ‘Operation’ Board Game, Saves Cardboard Life (Video)

Posted on by Marjorie Kaye Noble

FROM: SINGULARITY HUB

by Aaron Saenz April 7th, 2011

Modern life teaches us funny lessons like: if you can’t win at a child’s board game, use a multimillion dollar robot to cheat. PhD students at John Hopkins University’s Lab for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) ran into some trouble playing the classic board game Operation which requires you to remove tiny plastic organs from ‘Cavity Sam’ without triggering his electric alarm system and killing him. Their failure is a little daunting considering these guys are the next generation of surgical innovators. To overcome their limitations, those students hooked ‘Sam’ up to the da Vinci robot system from Intuitive Surgical. The video below shows the results. While this was all just a good natured joke, I’m glad the da Vinci robot and LCSR are getting some decent publicity from it. These robots, and the surgeons who use them, are saving thousands of lives each year and pushing us towards the future of medicine.

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I'm a writer. My name is Marjorie and name on my blogs is marjorie kaye. For my novels, I'm M. K. Noble. I live in California. I have worked as an actress, a casting director and a teacher. I have written two novels. The first is a horror novel, The Demon Rift. Besides the horror element, it spans a 120 years, ending in 2004 in an Ohio shopping mall. The mall culture echoes our recent past, the town square that has since become Facebook, etc. Babylon Dreams, a science fiction novel, set entirely in VR concerns life after death programs. Currently, I'm writing the sequel, Shemathra's Realm, a VR version of Animal Farm. Also, my short story, The Seventh Folding of Willow Sprite is available on StrangeFictionszine.com. I would love it if you read my work and will gladly answer any questions. Thanks for stopping by.

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