Slashdot Mirror
A Robot Learns To Fly
jerkychew writes: "For those of you that read my last post about the robot escaping its captors, there's more news regarding robots and AI. According to this Reuters article, scientists in Sweden created a robot that essentially 'learned to fly' in just three hours. The robot had no preprogrammed instructions on how to achieve lift, it had to deduce everything through trial and error. Very interesting stuff."
LONDON (Reuters) - A robot has taught itself the principles of flying -- learning in just three hours what evolution took millions of years to achieve, according to research by Swedish scientists published on Wednesday.
Ridiculous to compare prebuilt robot to evolution from some dinosaur to flying dinosaur (also known as bird). This really is tabloid headlining at it's purest.
And the robot didn't even fly, just generated some lift!
It's like saying humans can fly, when they generate 1N lift flapping their arms.
But it's great to see how selflearning robots and programs will start evolving now. I quess pretty soon computers and robots will be able to evolve faster on their own than when developed by humans.
Rather than comparing this to millions of years of evolution, perhaps it would be better to compare it to a bird just old enough to physically be able to fly.
The robot was physically equipped with all it needed to 'fly'; it was also equipped with all the wires in the right places. The fundamental difference between robots and living organisms is in the thinking: a newborn bird has to forge new synapses in its brain; this robot was designed with the purpose of 'learning to fly', so was given all the appropriate connections; it is just a matter of working out what sequence of events is required. Robots inherently have some form of co-ordination; birds, on the other hand, just like any other animal, have to develop such skills.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
However, the robot could not actually fly because it was too heavy for its electrical motor.
This thing didn't even learn to fly, it just flapped it's wings. And what kind of evolution did it go through, it didn't pass on different genetic information until a new trait was passed on forming a new race, it just flapped it wings.
Xaotik Designs
It may not have physically passed on its traits to any offspring, but from the sounds of it the program did internally pass on traits to the next generation (ie iteration of the program) when those traits proved to be successful. That's how an evolutionary/genetic algorithm works, and while it may not be evolution in the biological sense of the word, it clearly models the biological process.