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Computer Makes Robot Offspring

Posted by timothy on from the from-the-alma-mater-of-abbie-hoffman dept.

Flarenet writes: "Canoe.ca is reporting about a story where: 'A computer programmed to follow the rules of evolution has for the first time designed and manufactured simple robots with minimal help from people.'" This is a nicely satisfying result of the research (mentioned in an earlier Slashdot story) by Jordan Pollack and Hod Lipson of Brandeis University.

4 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. This is not reproduction by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 5

    "Robot offspring" implies there is some sort of reproduction going on, and this is NOT that. [insert obligatory beatdown of the exaggerating, stupid media].

    More accurately, this is a computer using a novel technique to design a machine with minimal human programming, and hooking up the computer to a manufacturing machine.

    Having a computer actually design a working machine is impressive enough without screaming about a computer generating its "offspring". And I have to say, it's somewhat pathetic that Slashdot dfollows along. Can I suggest changing the headline to "Computer creates its own design for a machine" or even if you want to be whimsical, "First generation Deep Thought takes first step at creating 'the computer that is to come after me, a computer that even I am not worthy to calculate its operational parameters'. But that's a little long. :)


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  2. Uh-Oh by drivers · · Score: 5

    Bill Joy is going to shit a brick.

  3. I'm impressed... by the gap btw. claim & reality. by TheDullBlade · · Score: 5

    I'm not entirely against the "let's do it because we can do it" spirit, but this is an indescribably lame hack.

    It would have satisfied the same basic criteria to have a bunch of snap-together motor+wheel blocks, and have the computer "evolve" the idea of snapping four of them into a little car (and I believe that the computer didn't evolve the construction method either, but just handled the design given a fixed set of parts; it might as well have been human technicians building the robots).

    The sad fact of evolutionary design techniques is that they only work for an adequately simulated environment with a formally-defined design goal. Useful, but no silver bullet; certainly not a way to improve the versatility of designs (since they only take into account what conditions and criteria you program into them).

    You can't move it out of a simulated environment (like having it build and test all models under real working conditions), or it would take as long as biological evolution, and we might as well breed our machines.

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  4. Evolutionary programming is disturbing by Keelor · · Score: 5
    As a friend of mine once showed me with a buggy program he wrote, you have to be careful how you define "success" in evolutionary programming. He wrote an ant simulator that kept a score for how well the ant did at foraging for food. Only thing was, the program had a slight bug, so at the end of the evolutionary phase, the "best" ant was the one that had figured out how to edit it's score directly. The problem was that the real goal was to increase the score, not find food.

    In a more real world example, evolutionary mining robots would have two ways to reach the defined objective of keeping reported numbers high: learning how to mine really well, or killing the humans and sending in fake reports themselves.

    BTW, a computer making robot offspring because it was told to design them isn't nearly as disturbing as the inevitable computer making robot offspring on it's own accord.

    ~=Keelor