Learning Autonomic Robots

Daath writes "The 27th of March, Professor Noel Sharkey et al starts a colony of living robots. 15 predators and 6 prey. It's an experiment in artificial evolution out of the Creative Robotics Unit at Magna. Here's a quote: 'The Living Robots have one goal, to obtain enough energy to survive and breed. The prey find their food from light sensors within the arena, while the predators feed off prey by stalking and chasing them before sucking away their power.' Magna has two articles, 'Predator and Prey Robots set up home at Magna' and 'Ground breaking Robotics experiment previewed'. "

Comments

Sounds more like a circus

[moniker_21]

"...spectacular 30 minute live action show - complete with atmospheric lights, smoke and music."

"Each show will begin in darkness. Dramatic music will flood into the arena as guests prepare themselves for the spectacular light, sound and science show."

Maybe I'm just a little jaded right now, but this sounds more like a circus show instead of a serious scientific experiment. I'm sure these are very complex robots, and the underlying idea is very interesting, but the whole BattleBots spin on it seems to trivialize the work. Now of course if he signs up Carmen Electra.......

Re:Viable population?

[gorilla]

It depends on the relative food source/requirements. We normally consider 'predators' to be large animals, which mean a lot of prey, but if you think about it, there are instances where the ratio is reversed. One cow can support thousands of fleas, ticks and other small beasties.

Maybe not, but still valuable

[drew_kime]

Think of it like the team who found the Titanic. Roughly zero scientific learning, but the public interest in it brought in enough money to fund development of the remote vehicles. Once the cameras point to something else, they're left with some expensive new toys to use to do some real work.

Re:Living Robots?

[Ubi_NL]

then all of the surviving robots get paired off randomly

...which makes this pretty stupid. The whole idea of evolution is built upon "selection" i.e. the robot that does best has most offspring. Just looking at survival rate is a measure for measuring fitness, but it's too crude a method for improving ones genes. Besides that now every surviving bot has the same amount of fitness (offspring). That seems to be some binary kind of selection which I at least have never come across in real life. Randomly mixing genes is therefore 'not' a good method to mimick nature.