PYTHON · NUMPY

Does a harder world cost more energy?

Raise the disturbance on a balancing robot by a factor of thirteen. Compute energy does what?

Measure compute and actuation separately across a thirteenfold change in disturbance and say which one scales.

01Challenge

Turn the disturbance up by a factor of thirteen. Before you run it: which rises more, the joules the machine spends thinking or the joules it spends moving?

Predict firstRaise the disturbance on a balancing robot by a factor of thirteen. Compute energy does what?

02Model

The brain's task-evoked increment is around one percent of its budget, and network energy does not separate across n-back difficulty levels. A harder problem does not raise the bill, it moves the money. That is not a curiosity: a body on a battery has a current limit and a thermal limit, and a machine whose power spikes when the world gets hard browns out exactly when it can least afford to. Actuation is different. A disturbed body must do more mechanical work, and no architecture repeals that.

03Guided practice

Run the sweep. Read the compute column down each arm, then read the actuation column. Compute the ratio of each across the disturbance range.

04Feedback

PASS WHEN You separated the two halves of the bill and only one of them moved.

If your run fails, check:

Compute is flat. The cascade spends 832.10, 852.84 and 866.45 joules across a thirteenfold disturbance change, a rise of four percent. The gain arm rises six percent, the cheap arm not at all.
Actuation rises between twenty-six and seventy-two times over the same sweep, depending on the arm. That is the body doing more mechanical work against a rougher world, and it is physics rather than a design choice.
Report these separately or the conclusion inverts. A single total would show energy climbing steeply with disturbance and hide the fact that the thinking half barely moved.

05Retrieve & space

Across a thirteenfold rise in disturbance, what happens to compute energy, and to actuation energy?
Why does a machine whose power rises with task difficulty fail at the worst possible moment?
What goes wrong if a result reports only total energy?

06Mastery & project

Report a robot's energy as compute and actuation separately, and say which of the two an architecture can change.

Find a published robot energy figure. Determine whether it separates compute from actuation, and what conclusion becomes unavailable if it does not.