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Robots that Lust and Reproduce

Posted by samzenpus on from the sweet-robot-loving dept.

redcone writes "The Guardian unlimited is reporting that Korean roboticist Kim Jong-Hwan, who founded the robot football (soccer) World Cup, and is the director of the ITRC-Intelligent Robot Research Centre, has developed a series of artificial chromosomes that, he says, will allow robots to feel lusty, and could eventually lead to them reproducing."

2 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I don't get it by rayver · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's another article here that provides a little bit more detail. It's pretty much software... a quick snippet from that article to summarize it all: "The artificial chromosome is a software system. It means that the information - their 'genes' - can be easily sent to other robots," he said. "So if I send the chromosomes to another robot, that robot can then reproduce by itself. In that sense the robots will be created by the 'genes'. The personality of robots will be created by artificial genes." Dr Kim said there was no danger that such self-reproducing robots would take over the world as portrayed in movies such as this year's blockbuster I, Robot. "If we design the chromosomes quite safely, then we can avoid such a bad situation," he said.

  2. Kim Jong-Hwan did NOT found RoboCup by jddqr · · Score: 4, Informative
    The original article is grossly erroneous. Kim Jong-Hwan had nothing to do with RoboCup, but rather the "Micro-Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament", which is a copy-cat event, and is orders of magnitude less popular than RoboCup.

    From http://robocup.mi.fu-berlin.de/buch/chap1/HistoryR oboCup.html :

    But there was Korea and researchers there were also active organizing their own robotic league. In September 1995, Jong Hwan Kim started the Micro-Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament (MiroSot). The first MiroSot competition was held in November 1996 in Korea with 23 teams from 10 countries. Mirosot tournaments followed then every year from 1997 to 2002, sometimes in the same country as the RoboCup events, as was the case in 1998 (France) and 2000 (Australia). However, in the MiroSot league only small robots compete, there is nothing similar to the mid-size robots used in RoboCup and there was no legged league until 2002. There is of course a kind of rivalry between MiroSot and RoboCup, each one claiming to be the World Cup on Robotic Soccer, but the RoboCup events have become much larger, are better organized and publicized as the MiroSot tournaments.