Fink and team have published a paper in Advances in Space Research that details a "communication network that would link rovers, lake landers, and even submersible vehicles through a so-called mesh topology network, allowing the machines to work together as a team, independently from human input," according to a press release. The scientists named their patent-pending concept the "Breadcrumb-Style Dynamically Deployed Communication Network" paradigm or DDCN, based on the fairy tale'Hansel and Gretel'. According to Fink, DDCN could help resolve one of NASA's Space Technology Grand Challenges by helping overcome the limited ability of current technology to safely traverse environments on comets, asteroids, moons, and planetary bodies. "If you remember the book, you know how Hansel and Gretel dropped breadcrumbs to make sure they'd find their way back. In our scenario, the'breadcrumbs' are miniaturized sensors that piggyback on the rovers, which deploy the sensors as they traverse a cave or other subsurface environment," explained Fink.

The fable of Hansel and Gretel describes the plight of two children over two types of threat; harm to their immediate survival and pain from hunger. The two contexts of self-preservation and feeding are evident from the flow of the story dialog, therefore an automatic re-playing of dialog can be realized by picking sentences from two lists; one containing sentences in the context of self-preservation, the other in the context of feeding. Theory and Internet humor appreciation surveys suggest that humorous sentences in the context of self-preservation have relatively constant preference with respect to age, while in the context of hunger and protection of feeding turf to decline with age, reflecting the reduced need for food with aging. Sentences in the context of sociosexual relationships increased in preference until adulthood then declined with maturity. Also, sentences in parenting context, such as when caring for offspring, society and the environment were found to increase in preference with age and maturity. Therefore in order to construct a recursive Hansel and Gretel dialog for audience of all ages, two lists of sentences are added to feeding: In sociosexual and parenting contexts. The self-preservation list is paired with one of the remaining three, representing three stages of age; youth, adulthood and maturity. The single thread story of Hansel and Gretel serves as a template for recursive dialog, making it possible to create alternative threads and unbound possibilities for plots, thereby duplicating the story structure without repeating the narrative.