REAL TACHIKOMA from Ghost in the Shell SAC

One of my passions is the anime franchise created by Shirow Masamune called Ghost in the Shell. It was originally a comic, back in the 1980s and later became a feature film in the 1990s. In the early 21st Century, Production I.G began production of a TV series that was one-part prequel to the movie and one-part adaption of the original comic. This series was called Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and managed to explore concepts that the movie and manga (Japanese comic) only touched upon. Concepts like consciousness, the human soul, machine souls, god, sentience, collective consciousness, to name just a few.

You can hopefully see why I adore GITS. One of the cooler characters on the SAC TV series is the Tachikoma. Well, there are several of them, but they are really just a single entity--or are they? On the surface, they look like giant, robot spiders crossed with tanks (see above). That blue thing on the back is where the pilot goes, but they don't need a pilot to function. They have a basic artificial intelligence that allows them to function on their own and even adapt to their environment. At the end of every mission, they sync up with each other like PDAs and share experiences. This is supposed to allow them to learn at the same pace, adapting in the exact same way--but they don't. They become individual and begin to think for themselves.

Now, I know what you're thinking--they do NOT become evil and try to take over mankind. The way their cousins in the original GITS manga explain it, why would they want to "take over mankind"?? Humans already wait on them hand-and-foot--giving them tune ups, oil-changes and so on whenever they need them.

Good point, huh? And that really speaks to the nature of these sentient tanks. They are innocent and childlike--on the show they're even voiced by squeeky-voiced women.

They're so cool that a real-live robot builder has built a real (but non-sentient) robot Tachikoma (pictured above). To see these robots in action, check out the vids below:

tachikoma1.mp4 (2.8 MB)

tachikoma2.mp4 (1.8 MB)

The "real" Tachikoma was created in conjunction with the new GITS SAC movie that premiered on a Japanese satellite channel earlier this month called (deep breath!) Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society.

Now, if only they'd sell them!!

Check out the 'bot's official site here: http://www.robo-garage.com/robo/tatikoma.html

Or, if you don't know Japanese, check out [http://robotgossip.blogspot.com/2006/08/killer-spider-tank-tachikoma.html|this August 22, 2006 post] at RobotGossip.BlogSpot.Com.