Country Dance Markup Language

Back in November, I mentioned that there was a markup language that seemed to be developing to deal with the complexities of cooking. Msr. Dagoski recently pointed out to me that someone has done the same sort of thing to help with the choreography of folk dances. Here’s the big quote from their website:

The goal of the CDML Project is to define a comprehensive formal language that describes contra dances and similar folkdances, can be read and understood by both software and humans, and can be extended.

Is that really what we need? Computers that know how to dance? Cooking I can understand. One of the staples of science fiction is the ability to walk into your kitchen, call out the the name of the dish you want, and then have the automated appliances serve up a batch of, for example, “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot.”

But folk dancing? I must be missing something pretty fundamental, but I’ve never had the foggiest desire to have a dancing robot. I may be in the minority though… According to Nature Magazine, Jimmy Or of Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan has created a belly dancing robot. Apparently, it simulates a network of nerves called a central pattern generator. It has something to do with either running around like a chicken with your head cut off, or shimmying like a lamprey. I must admit I was kind of creeped out by the picture and I didn’t read the article terribly closely.

On the other hand, I can see some benefits to trying to teach robots to dance.. I mean, if movies like Terminator or The Matrix are to be believed, eventually humanity will be virtually wiped out by artificial intelligences of our own creation. In that sort of situation, the ability to distract your robotic oppressors by shouting out, “Allemande Left!” could prove a vital tactical advantage. The square dance caller could be our single most powerful weapon in a fight against cybernetic tyranny! Imagine legions of glittering, beweaponed battle-bots, all forced to march in complex intertwined circles by the rhythmic chanting of a guy in a straw hat and overalls…