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

Re:Reminds me of tierra

[freality]

Tierra was by Tom Ray, a pioneer in the AL field. It was a great idea, but failed to turn around with interesting biodiversity. You'd create creatures, they'd optimize themselves, some variants and parasites would evolve, but then things would simmer down within a few hours and you'd be in a steady state for ever.

Network Tierra was Ray's response to this. It was supposed to allow a "Cambrian explosion" of biodiversity, by providing tons of (networked computer) space for the little creatures to explode into, and then specialize, in. This led to interesting migration behavior, and one of my all-time favorite web-pages http://www.isd.atr.co.jp/~ray/pubs/images/index.ht ml, but it too failed to spark that je ne sais quois, that spark of life.

Anyways, it did spark Avida and the Digital Life Lab at Cal Tech. Avida is essentially a deeper look at the fundamentals behind AL. In Tierra, I think the design philosophy was something like "make it look a lot like a living ecological system and the life-force will appear out of the ether", and actually, Tierra was a great leap forward beyond more mundane genetic programming a la John Koza.

Avida, on the other hand, is much more systematic in exploring the parameter space (which is large and sensitive) for setting up an AL system. This turned out to be fruitful, as Adami found that only when certain, very narrow, environmental conditions were met would the little creatures start outsmarting that Creationist boogeyman, the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Turns out that Tierra didn't have spatiality (needed to be more restrictive on who could sleep with who) and mutation rates (some power law math that's way over my head) set right.

But the real punch-line to this whole story is that the direct beneficiary of these insights in Microsoft! Hah!

Microsoft was funding Adami's work because Windoze crashed too much. They were searching for a way of programming, in this case using closed instruction sets like Avida's (another deep topic), that would be inherently robust to problems like seg faults and illegal instructions.... e.g. Adami's instruction set was engineered so that little programs (creatures) couldn't crash the Avida VM when they mutated into new, unknown programs.. or in Windoze's case, when a coder did something stoopid. It's funny that MS was researching this, since releatively low-tech solutions such as protected memory and QA take care of this. (not to mention Java :)

freality.com

p.s. Since when do research experiments post crowd-pleasing previews? That's for Hollywood.