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

Err, yeah

[daniil]

First of all, although it is a nice hack, it's hardly a breakthrough. I don't even think you can call these robots 'evolving', for they don't "evolve" any new kinds of behaviour -- they just keep on coming up with new combinations of old ones. The code behind this behaviour, however, doesn't change.

Re:Err, yeah

[Speare]

Uh...

The human body is just designed around a fixed number of atom types and a fixed number of genes. Clearly, we haven't evolved and cannot evolve in successive generations just by mixing these components in different ways.

Over a certain complexity level, emergent behaviors are formed in ways that were not designed. Emergent capabilities don't exceed the theoretical range of capability for the organism, but designing an optimum offspring turns out to be a devilishly difficult task, while genetics methodology often provides a near-optimum from very little initial design.

Are these really evolving?

[Sanity]

After reading the site, I am not sure I can see what opportunity there can be for evolution when there is only a population of two robots. Evolution requires competition, but there can be no competition when you only have two robots and each gets an opportunity to pass on their genetic code.

To exhibit real evolution you would need at least three robots, and realistically you would need many many more. A more realistic experiment migth be to evolve the robots in a simulated environment.

Re:Logical problem with their "evolution"

[belg4mit]

You need to revisit some coursework because selection doesn't care if it's "bad" or "good", just that it works. And if it works once it might work again, but it may lso be too haphazard and peter out in the long run.

So where's the code?

[Anonymous Coward]

All I see are some pictures and a suspicious story. Without the code I think this guy is just bullshitting us.

Re:Robot creationists

[mizhi]

But it honestly wouldn't be too far from the truth, right?

Except that, in this case, "God" is some dork in his underwear and a thinkgeek.com t-shirt. There's only ever been two "people" on the planet, one of them was Jesus (at least once), and the other looks the same as her mother, grandmother, great-grand mother, etc.

In all seriousness, I wonder if this isn't more an experience on collaborative learning than it is evolution? You have two beings with limited ways of moving, a simple communication protocol, and limited memory. It's not so much that genetic code is being passed down from generation to generation as it is methods of acting in the world. And on that, I'm not even sure it's learning per se. It's more like swapping random commands... there doesn't seem to be a reward/cost function of any sort. Still, it's interesting.

Re:Direct link to video

[Anonymous Coward]

I am going to install some software I've never heard of on my system just to get a video why?

To save the distributor of the video's bandwidth.

What's wrong with bittorrent?

Doesn't work without reconfiguring firewalls, requires a tracker, you can't watch the video until it has finished downloading, and lots more is wrong with BitTorrent.

Re:Hilarious.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only because most of us are too impatient to wait billions of years for the conditions to arise randomly

Re:Physical?

[ScentCone]

Why does evolution always catch more attention when it is played out in the real world?

Because we've pretty much squashed whatever native talent most people have for abstract thought (or for appreciating the fruits of thought experiments). Never mind that people bank on the the output of weather sims every time they pack up to go skiiing - but anything that requires some extrapolation to the physical world is just too much for too many people these days. I truly, truly lay that at the feet of the "it takes a village" educators, who happily displace critical thinking and logic work with warmer and fuzzier aspects of Socialization. That being said, of course, this is entirely up to parents to counter, and that would work if so many of them weren't also handicapped by the same lack of work in that area. Ironically, it's possible that kids playing decent quality sim games may actually wind up better at getting this stuff when they grow up!