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.

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.