Evolving Lego Mindstorms

John Conner writes "With a fairly simple routine, you can model evolution with Lego Mindstorms. In this hackaday experiment, robots were created that could mate, evolve, and become extinct. Similar technology could be used in real applications for deployed robot optimization and automatic software updates. Now that physical robot replication is near, it's only a matter of time before... well... You'd better make robot friends while you can."

Comments

My own experiment with GAs

[Sanity]

If you liked this you might also be interested in a recent experiment I did with genetic algorithms where I "evolved" creatures which could emulate an exclusive-or gate (ie. take two inputs, output 0 if they are the same and 1 if they are different).

The result was interesting, and from it I created a nice MPEG video which illustrates the learning process - you can find this if you follow the link above.

One interesting thing I discovered was the importance of sexual as opposed to asexual reproduction (insert lewd joke here) as I describe in a follow-up blog entry:

My first approach was simply to take the creature that performed best, and use it as the basis for the entire next generation, each of which contained random variations.

This approach was somewhat effective, although it tended to get stuck with a far from perfect solution, but where most small variation on that solution was worse (such as outputting 0.5 regardless of the input). This is known as getting stuck in a "local minima".

So I tried a different approach where we start out with completely random creatures for the first generation, as before, but instead of just taking the best and losing everything else, we take neighbours and "merge" them, where the better one forms 90% of the children's make-up, and the worse one the remaining 10%.

This had the effect of being much more resilliant against local minima as it gave more scope for the GA to try different options and where it found a good one, that may not be the best one, it kept it around for the next generation.

You can use other microcontrollers for Legos too.

[ron_ivi]

If you need a more powerful microcontroller for your legos, consider a GameBoy. Programmable in C or C++, has Sound and a color LCD display, and with a 32-bit RISC CPU, you can do far more with this than the current Mindstorm microcontroller.

Bluetooth modules are apparently also available for this device. Engadget has a description and a link to a cool video of this Gameboy/Lego interface in action

Direct link to video

[Anonymous Coward]

The video is cool, here is a direct link through Dijjer to save on bandwidth. You should definitely read the blog entry to understand what you are looking at.

Automatic design/manufacture of robots

[Jeffus]

Robots that evolve and fabricate themselves: http://helen.cs-i.brandeis.edu/golem/ The GOLEM project's been around for years.

Re:What!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately, some guy posted a robot overlords joke just seconds after you had posted yours. Seems that everything's still in order.

Re:Wrong

[Sanity]

That wouldn't be what we call a genetic algorithm.

You might not call it a genetic algorithm, but the people who write the comp.ai.genetic FAQ clearly consider asexual reproduction to be a form of genetic algorithm.

Re:Hilarious.

[dahlek]

I have no problem with your personal faith - as long as we agree that ID is not "scientific". Applying science to it would mean that we would need to infinitely find the creators of creators. Why do I talk about science in this regard? Because the implication was the 'creation vs evolution' debate. One is a science, the other, a religious belief.

Using the universe itself as evidence for a god can only work if we don't already accept a god going in (otherwise we would be employing circular-logic), and if we employ a 'no god going in' approach, then we have no taboo against finding the 'maker of the maker', etc., since the notion of 'no God before me', for example, is a specific religious idea that implies the existence of a god.