: Imagine having a surface composed of nano-sized electric charged domains. On
: a large scale there will be equal numbers of +ve and -ve domains so that
: the surface as a whole appears to be neutral. The -ves balance out the
: +ves over large distances.

: You could probably arrange the domains in fractal patterns something like
: these .

: If you had two complimentary surfaces then all the opposite domains would
: line up and they would stick fast. It works like hydrogen bonding.

: I'm thinking fractals because the larger parts of the patterns would attract
: each other gently and as they align then the smaller parts would start to
: line up - and so on down to smaller and smaller levels. The two surfaces
: would tend to slide into alignment when brought near each other.

: Now imagine that one surface is programmable. Imagine that its domains could
: be flipped via the application of a small electric charge. Think of the
: surface as being like the gates on a memory chip or the magnetic domains
: on a hard drive surface. It takes power to flip a domain but once flipped
: the change is permanent and takes no power.

: Also imagine that the active surface can sense the pattern of charges on the
: passive surface when it is near.

: As you can see from the wiki link , you can generate these fractals by
: performing a series of iterative steps. The fractals become more fine
: grained as the number of steps performed increases.

: That is quite useful as the passive surface could be very fine grained but
: the active surface could tune its granularity from coarse to fine. It
: could control how strongly it attracts the passive surface.

: When the active surface detects the proximity of a passive surface then it
: can express low level (coarse) attraction pattern. When it detects that
: the passive surface has come into alignment with that pattern then it can
: move the origin of its pattern to move the passive surface into a precise
: position.

: It can then up the number of pattern generating iterations to become super
: stuck.

: Power is only used when aligning patterns and changing stickiness.

: So we have about 5 parameters: x/y origin of pattern, x/y extent of pattern
: and the iteration number.

: The control code will be distributed across all domains with neighbours
: talking to neighbours. The active surface would be a massively parallel
: computing surface. maybe it can do other computing tasks when it's not
: flipping domains.

: Note that altering pattern origins can be used to move a scope backwards and
: forwards by nano-meter intervals. You could turn a knob to change the
: position or use a keypad to specify it as a number in nano-meters ;-)

or maybe, like super-velcro
I like your idea better though :D