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

Re:Wrong

[petefine]

A genetic algorithm without sexual reproduction is not random search. This is because the mutations only move a particular genotype a small distance within the space of all possible genotypes. By exploring the nearby locations, the GA can climb fitness gradients withough requiring sexual reproduction. If it were random, it would likely move to a completely different position in that state space.

In fact often, work in Evolutionary robotics does not use sexual reproduction, finding that mutations are more important in optimizing a robotic control system.