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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."
Evolution of code is pretty cool, but it could be improved upon with a few motors that actually build little Lego figures. I for one welcome our etc.
If people read that linked slashdot story, they would see that self-replicating robots are not much closer than when von Neumann wrote about them. The LEGO Mindstorm evolution is pretty cool just because Mindstorms is being used as a platform for this and since the evolution system is doesn't require an outside computer.
However, the small population used (2 bots) and the seemingly weak fitness function make me think that this project won't go anywhere fast (pardon the pun) and is just a genetic dead end. Evolution is dependent on the Law of Very Large Numbers for anything significant to happen.
If you really want to see something cool along the lines of evolving moving robots, I suggest the GOLEM Project. The robots don't manufacture themselves, but the system is a lot closer to biological evolution than most.
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Wired article as proof
Speaking of Robots... Alan Watts, the famed PHD Buddhist, before he died, spoke of the potential for a future where we live in a society with robots serving us instead of us serving the machine. He looked at it as an escape from a puzzle, to some extent, and that humanity is destined to escape from our confines and expand our knowledge into new areas of human development. When I read "The Book - On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are", I thought he was an insightful visionary. Funny thing is, he spoke of this future with Zen in mind and spoke of it as somewhat inevitable. I think it's great that these robots keep improving. I just wish we could spread these improvements uniformly over corporate structure, so that we don't have to keep serving the machine -- it should be serving us.
With all the advances they're making in prosthetics these days, I'm guessing within 50 years, we'll be treating our bodies more like cars, and we'll regularly upgrade ourselves to be faster and stronger.
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I can't find link to the thread now, but there are several Lego groups already talking of making LEGO robots that build Lego 'things' and it would only be a few more steps to get Lego robots to build parts for other Lego robots, and other Lego robots to assemble the parts. I'm pretty certain that its a probable event in the near future, given the 'coolness factor' of having built the first 'plastic' skynet :-)
Is it just me, or have other people noticed how the 'replicators' on SG1 look a lot like 'evolved' Lego robots?
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I was SOOOO hoping the lego bots would rebuild themselves each generation.
Actually, I really like this guy's idea. I wonder if there's a way to build a commodity bot to implement the idea...
Something like this
If I were to list the design criteria it would be:
cheap programmable controller (like one of those $3 PICs or something)
commodity IR gear
two-motor steering
bump sensors
changeable actuator
simple charging
The actuator would be things like a pincer on the front (to pick things up), or a crane, or a pronged fork. Doesn't matter. Point is to differentiate the population to give natural selection a chance to do its thing.
The charger, I would probably make the wheels metal and make charging areas such that any orientation the bot goes over the area will result in a charge. Use mini supercaps for energy storage.
I even have a perfect platform in mind;
zipzaps.
Give me a zipzap chassis with a few modifications (like ripping out the radio gear and replacing it with a PIC)
Ideally I'd like to get the build cost under $10. Then you could afford to run a real population. Anything that doesn't get back to the sensor pad gets killed from the genome and recharged. If two bots are in the charge area and agree to reproduce, they both send their genomes to the wiped bot who does his combinatorial magic on it.
I'd be interested to see what sort of emergent behaviours might occur...
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About 5 years ago I read a paper on an experiment with using sexual reproduction with simulated life. I wish I could remember the authors, because their results were actually interesting.
The way they set it up was to have a grid in which organisms lived (all simulated in a computer, of course). Each organism was controlled by a neural network. Males had eyesight, so they could tell what was in front of them a few squares. Females had a sense of smell, so they could tell when a male was around. (IIRC). In order to mate, a male and female had to meet at the same point (or adjacent points, while pointing the right way, I cant exactly recall).
Now, the fact that males and females had to find each other produced some interesting results. First of all, the organisms evolved "mating dances", just diferent patterns in which the male and female moved that helped them meet each other. The second very cool result was that they got speciation. Different sets of organisms couldn't mate with each other, not because their genes were incompatible, but because their mating dances differed. They just couldn't find each other. So, they ended up with different species of organisms which would all reproduce, but mostly within their own groups.
Very interesting stuff.
It is amazing to observe the progress of evolution. Initially, the agents act as though they don't know what they are doing, their movements being very laboured and imprecise. As the population continues to evolve, individuals from the later generations begin to increasingly show signs of intelligent improvements. Such as being able to coordinate and time their movements to afford them better walking/running behaviors. What is really surprising is that as I allowed the population to continue to evolve, I saw behaviors that I could never have predicted. Some of the agents began to do "tricks" and evolved some strange jumping or sommersalting behaviors, not unlike that of a gymnast.
If you get a chance, check out my thesis. It is freely available (with GPL'd source code) at: http://www.erachampion.com/ai
Karl Sims did some fantastic work on evolving movement a decade ago. Creatures were randomly assembled using blocks and a few standard connectors, and eventually evolved a wide variety of strategies for motion. My favorties were the 3-block creature which moved like an ape and the 2-block creature which moved in the same way a washing machine walks.
An alternative to sexual reproduction (which is not always possible, depending on your application) is to keep "physical discontinuity". For wrapping "world" of a varying number of dimensions, each object only competes with its neighbors. For a large enough world (a 1d ring seems to work best), you can lower the odds of getting stuck on local maxima because different approaches will be taken all around the ring without interference from neighbors that may initially perform better but max out sooner. Over time, the best performing elements will eventually spread to take over the whole ring, but it's a much slower process, and by that time, a slower but more adaptable evolutionary approach elsewhere on the ring can have bested them.
BTW, to whoever said that bacteria don't have sexual reproduction: that's not exactly true. Many bacteria actively take part in "gene exchange" (not for reproduction, just an outright exchange of genetics), and bacteria are widely known to often take up bits of free DNA that they encounter and incorporate them into their own genome. A better example would have been parthenogenic multicellular animals, like whiptail lizards.
I once listened to a Philip Glass record for an hour and a half before I realized it was skipping.
For those that are interested in this sort of thing, the paper was published in ALife IX and is online.
Meta bracketing the evolution of the use of Legos in the scientific community might be as fruitful as the use of the Lego Mindstorms set. Investigation is limited by the questions we ask and the tools we have at hand. The use of Lego "toys" and the meme that has grown up around them has alot to tell of what we can accomplish and how we set out to accomplish it. Over history at large, an example might be Euclidean geometry which funneled and defined much of scientific thought up to the time of Newton, and is now seen to be limited and antiquated. In miniture the use of Lego Mindstorms to investigate "serious" science in an interesting paradigm that continues to influence and grow popping up in diverse books and papers.
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Cohen
This isn't really evolution, since there is no determination of fitness. With normal GAs you (somehow) evaluate the "fitness" of the creature, which is typically used to drive how often, and with whom, the creature reproduces.
In the stuff I've done, general lifespan is driven by genes, as are reproduction behaviors, movement and eating habits. Available "energy" i.e. food eaten, put additional limits on lifespan and mating. Thus, there are some "natural" fitness measurements, if a creature dies off before it mates, it wasn't fit enough... If it doesn't have enough energy to share with it's offspring, that allows them both to survive, it wasn't fit enough.
One of the more interesting genes I've been using lately is a "mutation rate". If I start out with some base creatures, that I know are likely to survive, but aren't great, they will frequently evolve to the point where they are co-existing with the environment pretty well, and once that point has been reached, their mutation rate drops to nearly zero.
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel