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"Living robot" Escapes Lab, Makes It To...Parking Lot
jerkychew writes "This is either really cool or really scary, depending on how you look at it. According to this article, scientists in England have been experimenting with so-called 'living robots' that think and act for themselves. During an exercise that pitted the machines against each other in battle, one of the machines, named Gaak, was taken out of the competition and left alone for fifteen minutes. When the scientist returned to retrieve Gaak, he found that the machine had broken free from its 'cage', and made it all the way to the lab's parking lot before it was apprehended! Can the T-1000 be far behind?" Update: 06/20 20:36 GMT by T : Thanks to skywalker404, who points out the Magna site and Professor Noel Sharkey's web page.
Last time I looked, South Yorkshire was not in Australia...
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
HAH! i could swear that we are the ones who just grew a thymus out of stem cells... you yanks are so arrogant...
and yes, i do realise the parent was a joke, but the patriotic spirit lingers....
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He he! Good one!
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
I'll try and give you a little background on this - I actually went along there last Sunday and saw Gaak and his brethering then... First Magna is a "Science Adventure Centre" housed in what was a Steel works near Sheffield - this place is basically a huge shed filled with strange leftovers from the steel making, with long walkways and 4 exhibition areas inside. The whole place is done with a sort of gothic frankenstein science style - lots of sparks etc. The living robots part is a new exhibit organised by Dr Noel Starkey (of Sheffield University - best known for being a judge on Robot Wars). There are a total of 12 robots, of 2 basic designs (although they are apparently not completely identical within the types). The two types are predator and prey. Prey robots look like animated inverted wastebins with solar panels on the top. Their aim in life is to avoid being predated upon and to feed. Feeding involves soaking up energy from the light trees (2 sets of lights on the edge of the arena). I assume that the feeding etc is to demonstrate behaviour in that there is no way they could get enough energy from the solar panels on them to actually run for any length of time. The robots have 8 infra-red sensor/emitters around the shell which put out a type recognition code and detect other emitters in the area - so they can recognise other prey and ignore them, and see preditors before they ge t got. The preditors, of which Gaak is one, look like some form of fork lift truck. Their role in life is to find prey, grab them and lift them off the ground. They then have an arrangement where a probe enguages with a connector on top of the prey and "sucks some energy" out of the prey. Following this feeding process the preditor releases the prey and then goes torpid for a short time. The "intelligence" is based on some form of neural network - I didn't get details of this. At the end of each day the data on each robot is downloaded along with the neural net configurations. The 2 most successful predators have their neural nets merged to produce a new "evolved" network which is downloaded to all the predators. Similarly for the prey. Theory is that this produces an evolutionary basis for their behaviour. I find it hard to be convinced of this process having much real scientific value, and the displays have too little violence for a population that watches Robot Wars :-)