Slashdot Mirror
Co-Evolving Robots At Brandeis
neck jones pointed out this site titled "Towards Fully Automated Design of Real Robots" at the Brandeis Dynamic & Evolutionary Machine Organization Lab which dropped my jaw. As neck says: "Whoah." Anyone who can summarize their work by beginning "Start with a set of simple bodies and set of random brains" and go on to describe automated, automatic fused depositon manufacturing already has my attention.
tcd004
Here's my Microsoft parody, where's yours?
This kind of stuff is what really gets me excited. Imagine the potential of this stuff if we sent a small set of evolving robots to a distant planet. They could have a database containing information on how to build various types of robots, and also, for eventual use, information on how to create humans, using a digital copy of human DNA, or frozen fertilized eggs.
/cool/?
Imagine it... Robots being used to help us colonize other worlds. Is that not
--
Matthew Walker
My DNA is Y2K compliant
Matthew Walker
http://www.tweeterdiet.com/ - My Diet Tracking Tool
Seriously, I'm a bit skeptical to the idea of construction by essentially throwing dice.
"The good die first." "Most of us are morally ambiguous, which explains our random dying patterns." --- MST3K
Eventually this will evolve to replace the children so that they will not be necessary anymore.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
This work out of Brandeis is an implementation of the thought-experiment done by Valentino Braitenberg in chapter 5 his book Vehicles, which outlines experiments in evolution of simple robots. The main differences between the Brandeis work and Braitenberg's experiment are that the robots are being constructed to particular practical ends and most of them are simulated before they are built. Damn. Wow. Well done!
The Second Amendment Sisters
Finding God in a Dog
Mata ah-oo Hima de
Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto
Himitsu wo Shiri Tai
You're wondering who I am - Machine or mannequin
With parts made in Japan, I am the modren man.
I've got a secret, I've been hiding
Under my skin.
My heart is humn, my blood is boiling
My brain IBM.
So if you see me, acting strangely
Don't be surprised.
I'm just a man who, needed someone
And somewhere to hide
To keep me alive - Just keep me alive.
Somewhere to hide to keep me alive.
I'm not a robot, without emotion
I'm not what you see.
I've come to help you, with your problems
So we can be free.
I'm not a hero, I'm not a saviour
Forget what you know.
I'm just a man whose, circustances
Went beyond his control - beyond my control.
Beyond my control, we all need control.
I am the modren man, who hides behind a mask
So no one else can see, my true identity
Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto, Domo (Domo), Domo (Domo)
Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto, Domo (Domo), Domo (Domo)
Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto [Repeat several X's]
Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto for doing the jobs that nobody wants to
And thank you very much, Mr. Roboto for helping me escape just when I needed to
Thank you - Thank you. Thank you.
I want to thank you, please thank you.
Oh! Oh-ah-oh!
The problem's plain to see
To much technology
Machine's to save our lives
Machines dehumanize
The time has come at last.
To throw away this mask.
Now everyone can see.
My true identity.
I'm Kilroy!
Kilroy!
Kilroy!
Kilroy.
This type of work is definately interesting and has produced some good results. If you are interested, definately check out the references at the bottom of the page, they are some of the defining work in this area. For your convenience I've linked up a few here (for some reason they're not linked from the actual site):
Karl Sims stuff
His Original Paper
Some cool pictures and more links
That should get you started.
Hotnutz.com - Funny
1. Introduce the idea of survival through predation.
2. Add some virtual physics.
3. Slap the simulation in the world's biggest cluster.
4. Sit back and see how long it takes the simulation to nuke itself!!
Now seriously.. All this amounts to is simple expansion of neural net evolution technique... We're still limited by the brains we can give the little virtual monsters..
.sig: Now legally binding!
Sounds like they've managed to duplicate the intelligence of an average AOLer. What an advance in artificial stupidity - I'm impressed!
Anyone willing to write a distributed.net client & server for this. Downloading new robots seems to be much more fun than donwloading packets.
It's a java applet where you can design some silly little robots in 2-D, and see how you can make 'em work. No neural networks, or real-world synthesis, but hey, it's cool!
My Freakin Blog
Signal 11 is really a 98 year old deaf and blind black woman who lives in a geriatric home in Kansas. Slashdot is everything she's got, so please go easy on her.
This looks very similar to ideas found in Rudy Rucker's fiction. Those interested in some good, entertaining science fiction type stuff might want to check out his books, especially Software and Wetware. I'd almost call his books "cyberpunk", but they aren't dark and gloomy.
Fool@WorkI want way more detail on the "printing" process. Man. That looks really cool. I think it'd be awesome to be able to take an arbitrary 3-D model and "print" it as a fully-detailed plastic model.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
It certainly sounds like an interesting frontier, but I wonder if it will ever really be practical.
grnarrow
www.bottomquark.com
Have a look at stereolithography and other rapid prototyping processes ! This kind of technology has been out for ages (still a bit too expensive ; I wanted to have the technical high school I work for, buy one, so that at least *some* CAD exercises could be made matter), and still evolves very very very rapidly. Attend any big CAD trade show in your area, you'll probably see some RP in action..
Though it's quite imperfect, have a look at http://www.machpro.fr (also in English) for some links & contacts on RP hardware providers (and many other processes, by the way).
I'm a Univ of Delaware Mech Engineering grad student and we had a talk on this from a related researcher earlier this year. It has some cool potential in a lot of areas, but also some strong disadvantages.
Basically a modular robot is cool in that it can adapt to situtations, have redundacy in case a module fails, etc. Makes for a great exploration units.
The main problem with them is that they're a bitch to control. The processing demands rise with the square of the number of modules, so they get sluggish pretty darn fast. They also are more inefficient than a committed robot and can have problems with local weaknesses. Basically a bad configuration can easily overload one module and cause failure of the whole robot. Preventing that takes even more processor time to test possible configurations, creating a wicked cycle.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
Besides the program's innate ability to recreate star constallations, I do have to say this is interesting. The whole concept may even lend proof to evolution in a very simplistic way. If we gave a brain to a peice of silly putty and let it run around, would it eventually be a lizard or a snake? If we put it in water, would it become a fish? It is even becoming appearent that thoughts and decisions could effect evolution, wouldn't you say? If we program the peice of silly putty in water that the faster it swam, the better, and it randomly changed parts of it's body, when it becomes faster, it locks a change until another change makes it faster... well, you could actually write a program to simulate evolution. Hmm.. just a muse I guess, but doesn't it make animals look simple?
-Effendi
-Effendi
I've been co-evolving Visual Basic scripts and Virtual Windows users for a while now. For fun, the fitness metric for VBscripts has been the number of copies that would thrive in a virtual network environment. It wasn't perfect (got stuff like "I hate go to school"), but the results were pretty interesting overall. I guess I just want to warn the fine people at Brandeis not to let their experiment break loose. Not that it happened to me, but you know, people should be careful with these things.
As we all know in the movie The Matrix, AI somehow came to destroy humanity. This is what many of us fear AI will become. I'de like to point out that we usuaily get out of technology what we put into it. If you are Micro$oft, you put crap into your os, you get crap out of your os. If we design AI as a weapon, I have NO DOUBT that AI will destroy us. So, I believe we should take great care to avoid creating destructive systems, but rather systems that are friendly. Construction systems like the NASAs robot snakes, automotive safety systems, explorers, harvesters, educational systems, and such.
AI devices need not be concerned with power or money of world dominance.
And I don't believe Microsoft is Evil,
if only they cared about their customers,
like that care about their stockholders.
$0.02 - Please overlook my spelling and gramatical errors... you get the idea i think.
Peace
L8r
Dolio
...or does this graphic come straight out of the old 3d car game spectre?
/ collision.jpg
http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem/simulator
to mail me, first remove the evil spam.
In Tippler's book, he proclaims that the robots become the center stage; that is- (backing up the train of thought)
Frank J Tippler, in The Physics of Immortality says that before we send out autonomous robots they will need to be able to pass the Turning Test if they are going to be versatile enough to deal with their unpredictable environment as successfully as a manned mission to the same place.
Later he goes on to say that these robots will soon evolve past our level and take over the universe. To him, this seems to be the first step to the realization of his "omega point" theory... but to me it seems like something else entirely. Fully self-sufficient and reproducing robots- could that be easily considered a new form of life? I see where you are coming from- the problems of raising a human being in a test tube... but what it boils down to- I don't think that they would be a human being. Not emotionally, and probably not on a cognitive level... but why would this robot in a new world want to mess around with biochemistry? Utterly pointless! I'm with Tippler on the coolness of creating these robots- and the possibility of them being a higher form of life. Hmm, controversial? I hope so!
One of the very first things I downloaded from the web in 1994 was this mpeg file of Karl Simms' evolved swimming fish. It was a hell of a download at 10mb over 14.4Kbps, but it was worth it! I am certain this is a hardware version of Simms software project (he did it on one of those giant Thinking Machines Hypercubes that the Defense Department loves so much)
The video shocked me and changed my life. It's a wonderful video to show people that don't believe in evolution. After seeing this, you really have no IGNORE hard to remain IGNORant of the power of evolution.
I can't seem to find a copy of the paper behind this video, but it is equally shocking. Try to find it yourself, it is definately worth reading.
"Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics", Karl Simms, Computer Graphics, Volume 25:319-328, Number 4, August 1991, SIGGRAPH'91.
I remember at the time thinking it would be great if the simulated hardware in Simms' simulation (how many Simms would a Simms Sim sim if a Simms Sim could sim?) could actually be constructed... you could evolve a robot in a machine, and only actually build it after it was perfected.
Looks like that is exactly what going to happen
-- Win a MINT copy of BYTE MAgazine Issue #1 = September 1975Well...Im amazed. There are so many possibilities for this type of technology. With rapid prototyping and comptuing advances to come, we could just plunk down a central processing/production center somewhere, give it a task, and let it go.
/. just ran). Who can imagine what else can happen for these little guys. (Hell-no one knows! That's what the little guys are evolving themselves for! Oh well, Ill just go sit in a corner now.)
On a side topic, it's almost reminiscent of how in rts games like C&C, endless tanks just kept pouring out of those little factories. Being able to do that in real life would be amazing.
But back to the main point. I really think this could be usefull in some upcoming space colonization missions (see the article
--------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------
"
That's a description of Slashdot, isn't it?
Regards, Ralph.
So, perhaps someone will model cell functions in a computer, let them evolve, and decide what new kinds of life we should create.
I think THAT was what Bill Joy was trying to warn people about.
*****Never argue with a crazy person, people might not know the difference*****
1) Behaviour based robotics seeks to reproduce the behaviour of simplistic creatures such as ants and bees. The idea is to incrementally improve on behaviours these robots have, pushing them further and further up the evolutionary ladder. It seems however that there is a limit to how far this technique can go. Noone is going to magically add an all purpose "intelligence" behaviour to one of these things.
2) Genetic algorithms are powerful, but rely heavily on human tweaking to guide the process. Of course evolution is a powerful process, but the inherenet parallelism of the process in the real world, cannot be simulated effectively and on a large scale using computers. No matter how many boxes you stick together...
I guess what I am trying to say is this. AI is full of amazing little tricks and techniques. They just don't impress me anymore.
Very cool indeed; as a matter of fact, I had exactly the same idea (co-evolving in a simulator) after reading the recent snakebot stuff. If even I can have such an idea, why wasn't this tried earlier. The next thing to do is to evolve locomotion for snakebots, along the same lines.
:-)
But it is a long way to achieve the capabilities of even the lowly nematode, let alone ant or cat!
(and mind you, this is just locomotion on a flat surface; makes you wonder if the critters could invent ^W evolve the wheel