A rather linkbaity headline; I send text messages using vodka pretty often, and then I have to check to see what exactly I said in the morning.
Interesting, though. Seems like a series of breezes could seriously impact the communication, though, making the whole robots-in-the-sewer system not work quite so well.
Text messages are only the relatively boring first step in this kind of project. If these guys go on to implement IP/Vodka they can proudly follow in the footsteps of such
hacks as RFC 1149 :-) "The network smells a little slow today"
Given huge number of possible molecules and the relatively slow nature of wafting them around the room, I suspect they plan to pack a lot more that 1 bit of information in each molecule!
I think it's worth exploring non-standard means of establishing networks no matter how ostensibly silly as they can come in extremely useful when e.g. governments try to restrict internet access in oppressive countries or natural disasters occur, etc.
Though I'm not sure if this particular example is of much use ;-)
Point a camera at the place where the smoke pit would be. Poof! Automation.
As to smell, that was a stupid way to do it.
We can detect levels of lots of different things. Instead of 1 or 0 over time it would have made a lot more sense to say Ok, I need to be able to encode 140 characters with 37 choices (alpha-numeric + Space).
There is a humidity sensor, a Carbon monoxide sensor, an oxygen sensor, and a Carbon dioxide sensor. All are really cheap.
If you a tube and 37 levels that you release water, carbon monoxide, oxygen, and carbon dioxide to. You now have the ability to send. 4 characters at a time. Since alcohol sensors are cheap, we can use that for "parity" so we know that the message was sent correctly.
Interesting, though. Seems like a series of breezes could seriously impact the communication, though, making the whole robots-in-the-sewer system not work quite so well.