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

Yay

[NiftyNews]

So we're teaching robots to teach themselves the best and most effective ways to kill things. Man, that's a great idea. Thanks, scientists!

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.

Can you Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?

[satanami69]

I don't even think the Discovery channel could get away with airing that kind of orgy.

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:Viable population?

[Atrahasis]

In which case the predator is not a predator, but a parasite. What will determine this is whether the predators drain the power from the prey

a) until their own battery is full
b)until the prey battery is empty
c)Until their own battery is full, and then discharge the rest to kill off the prey.

I don't know if varying feeding time is part of their program, but I hope it is, otherwise thew experiment means very little.

Also, what happens if a predator catches a meal while it is under one of the lights?

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.

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.