Billy the Cat

Remember the Beano comics from the UK? As a kid, I had a neighbour who loved that comic book. I used to hang out at his shop/home to read. Later, I pestered my dad to buy a few copies during our regular visits to our book haunt, Sungei Road Market. They were all thick Beano annuals, which was a great read on a rainy day. Besides the antics of Dennis the Menace, there was one other story series that I liked tremendously: Billy the Cat. Actually, it was Billy the Cat and Katie, the girl and other half of this cat-suit wearing, crime-fighting duo. Their suits were nothing feral like Cat Woman's or Batman's. They looked racer-like what with the helmets and visors covering their heads and eyes. They remind me of what the blind Geodie in Star Trek: Next Generation wore. It altogether looked pretty advanced. I don't think it was explained how the visor worked; it just was. As a kid, I found that quite cool. Cool too was that claw-like thing that the kids would throw to haul themselves up high walls and to entwine the bad guys with. The claws were handy also in rescuing themselves from binds and for cutting through stuff. This claw was hung from their sides beside their backpack of tricks. As a kid, I would make myself a claw like that and throw it at railings to pretend scaling them. Inevitably, I would fail as my claw would never be strong enough. Still, in that regard, Billy the Cat and Katie made us kids feel like we were mini-James Bond or spy kids. (I later owned a small stuffed alligator paw/claw keychain which I would pretend to use as Billy's claw-gadget in my idle moments). There were gadgets too, which were held in the backpacks that Billy and Katie carried. I particularly remember the remote controlled robots they would deploy to help fight crime. These robots were not huge, just about a foot high and they acted and behaved like real people. At the time, I remember thinking: "Woah, how advanced! When will we see something like that!?" Further more, the robots were able to act together in a sort of group dynamic, perhaps empowered by swarm intelligence(?) I think the tiny robots looked like Billy and Katie in costume, so they were sort of like miniature Iron Men running around. That was my first introduction to remote control, robots and advanced robotics all at one go. They now remind me of similar ones Arthur C Clark wrote in his Rama book series. The robots were brought into space to help explore an alien object. Probably a better visual would be the agile robots in Will Smith's I, Robot, albeit at a much smaller scale. If such tiny intelligent dynamos go rogue, it would be very, very scary indeed. In the past year, I worked to bring in programmable robots to help kids better learn robotics at a center. These were also foot-high and you could program them to dance, perform tai-chi and even do cartwheels, albeit in a not-so-quick manner. These robots had a somewhat humanoid but skeletal look, made of aluminum and interconnected by servo motors at the joints. At the time, a local polytechnic had also created a software version of it, one that you could program and place in a virtual environment. The best thing is, with the friendly computer interface, you could actually also control the real-world robot with whatever the software robot has learnt. That was pretty useful and convenient, I thought. But the real gem was allowing it to navigate in 3-D virtual space. One could play 3-D architect. There have been many advances made to such small humanoid robots. Many of the cheaper ones come from South Korea. I, for one, hope to see a small agile robot with a smart vision system or one with true artificial intelligence. It's not so different a wish I had back in the 70s when I was reading Billy The Cat. Sigh, sometimes ideas do take a long time to become reality, just like 3G networks and their corresponding smart mobile phones. But at least one good thing did come out from reading Billy The Cat. It inspired me to go on to learn electronics. I am actually and naturally a more mechanical guy, but I thought learning electronics (and RF electronics at that) would aid my natural abilities. How true!. Perhaps one day I will return to fiddling with transistors, diodes and servo motors, and programming software. After all, I was nominated once for a national technology award for building something very useful. Stuff like this is not beyond me. Sci-fi dreams can come true, don't they?