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Swiss Experimenter Breeds Swarm Intelligence
destinyland writes "Researchers simulated evolution with multiple generations of food-seeking robots in a new study of artificial swarm intelligence. 'Under some conditions, sophisticated communication evolved,' says one researcher. And in a more recent study, the swarms of bots didn't just evolve cooperative strategies — they also evolved the ability to deceive. ('Forget zombies,' joked one commenter. 'This is the real threat.') 'The study of artificial swarm intelligence provides insight into the nature of intelligence in general, and offers an interesting perspective on the nature of Darwinian selection, competition, and cooperation.' And there's also some cool video of the bots in action."
Of all the Nations, I would never have thought it would be the Swiss who would start the robot apocalypse. I had Germany in my betting pull...
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
First XKCD points out the obvious weapons end of things, now this guy announces how the brains have already been developed.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
To counteract his theories about swarm-intelligence, I sent the researcher link to 4chan.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
In other news, an experiment by SourceForge, using it's meatspace zombienet "Slashdot" proved that even Google-owned YouTube can be brought to it's knees by enough people trying to watch the same video at the same time.
oh, too obvious?
Well then, in Soviet Russia, robot overlords welcome You!
is this the beginning of replicators (from the Stargate universe)?
"Prey" is a pretty good scifi novel about this. It follows the tired cautionary-tale forumla, but like all of Crichton's novels has (some) basis in real research.
Caffeine is my anti-drug!
Duranin - A NWN2 Roleplaying Persistent World
"Crabs Take Over the Island" by Anatoly Dnieprov is somewhat based on the same idea, not in that swarm scale, but scary anyway.
Cool - but why use real robots for this? Seems like you'd be better off creating virtual robots in a simulated environment to develop the algorithms for something like this. You don't have to worry about dead batteries and hardware failures, and your simulations can run faster than real-time.
Then again, maybe that's what the researcher did, and we're just seeing the end product applied to real robots.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
conspicuously absent is any explanation of what is meant by "learned" in this context or how the algorithms "evolved"
they also evolved the ability to deceive.
Obviously, once you've proved the entity has the ability to deceive, you must distrust any further results.
Do I understand this correctly? On top of superhuman strength and intelligence, we're now making steps toward robot evolution? When robots rule the world, do you think they'll debate whether or not they actually evolved from primitive PCs?
"You fool! We were created in our present form by the great nerd in the sky! Shun the non-believer!"
in this post: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/08/19/185259
I for one welcome our new multi-generational food-seeking robot-overlords' swarm intelligence.
Of course he was only joking! He knows just as well as we all do, that the outbreak of a Zombie apocalypse is way more likely than his swarm bots eating our brains. Because the robots won't reproduce exponentially by eating your brains, they will have to rely on the superior robotics skills of the zombies to survive.
We have not even realized swarm stupidity yet, how can they claim swarm intelligence?
Hope is the currency of fools
Real hardware can hold more states than a purely digital system.
I remember reading a paper (can't find it now though - darn it) about a guy who was doing neural net research with Xilinx chips. Same idea. Whenever an algorithm would do well he'd break it into "genomes" and pair them off with other successful programs.
The board was a bank of Xilinx chips, the genomes were the programming files (basically 1s and 0s fed into the configuration matrix), and the goal was to get the thing to turn on and off when you would speak "on" and "off" into a microphone.
It eventually started working. More interesting than that is what happened when he loaded the program into another board. It didn't work.
It turns out the algorithm had evolved to take advantage of the analog properties of the specific chips in that particular board. The algorithm didn't see the board as a digital thing. It saw it as a collection of opamps, amplifiers, and other analog parts. Move the program to a board that is identical digitally, and it failed because the chips weren't analog exact. You wouldn't have seen that behavior in a purely digital simulation.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You should see what the next generation looks like, based on how many of the anonymous get to reproduce.
I think that 4chan would be the equivalent of "poison" in the tests.
their hearts are *truly* klingon!
Whether you should go towards certain colours of light or away from them, how soon you should do this, how important this is compared to other factors, whether you should flash your lights then or not... That kind of things. Predetermined methods with different parameter values for each robot. And combining propably means taking average values of a set of robots.
I agree that it would be nice if we would know more about the mechanics (what the methods and algorithms were, their initial values and that sort of things). It is a shame that so many news sources try to explain things in layman terms. The end result is that laymen still won't understand but those who would have the potential to understand don't get enough information.
Just with the limited human intelligence, limited resources and limited ability the researchers are able to create great levels of cooperation on mindless robots without any free will. Makes me wonder, if we are designed, as many Intelligent Design advocates claim we are, was the designer "intelligent"? With infinite wisdom and omnipotence and infinite resources, the Designer (or Designers) should have been able to create much more cooperative human beings. No wars. all peace. I wonder how they (the IDists) are able to square their ability ti "infer design" with the obvious "deficiencies of design".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I did. Did you understand the meaning behind the paragraphs you cite?
I did! Whenever you hear about a robot/AI "evolving", you should immediately think Genetic Algorithms. Most frequently in association with Neural Networks as is the case here (mentioned lower in TFA).
I am confused as to how it was possible to understand the claims it made. Robots don't have genomes and don't eat food. Their "genomes" cannot be recombined. Robots have code and programmers. What does a random change mean in this context? Do they use faulty dram or mess with the voltage?
Robots have code. That code can be (is) represented as a series of bits. That series of 1s and 0s can be considered the "genome" of the robot. And can you randomly change bits, or recombine portions of bit patterns? Absolutely. When you have a "population" of such bit patterns which you test out, then take the best ones and copy them, randomly mutate them, and recombine them together, then test the new population and repeat, you have a Genetic Algorithm.
Now that's possible but time consuming to do with the actual instruction bytes of the AI. In the case of Neural Networks with Genetic Algorithms, the "genome" is actually just the organization of the neural net -- the connections and weights between the neurons.
The robots still have programmers, but the programmer is not directly writing instructions for the AI to follow. Instead, they're writting an interface between the robot's sensors and the neural network, the neural network code itself (not its organization), and the code that does the genome mutation/recombination. From there, the AIs "evolve" and "learn" on their own and arrive at often fascinating solutions to problems.
For example in this case, the programmers did not teach the robots how to deceive each other. That behavior emerged on its own from the genetic algorithm. So, there really isn't any hyperbole at all in the summary/TFA. Though it would be helpful if they at least mentioned genetic algorithms so skeptical people have something to google. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
Why even bother with robots? So it looks more real and tangible than just a computer simulation? Maybe, but other than that it's a waste of time and resources. Anything you could learn you could learn from a simulation of those robots, since this is entirely an algorithmic problem. I guess these guys just like to play with robots.
You just got troll'd!
Oh, so it's just like that episode of Star Trek where tonnes of tiny intelligent robots take over the Enterprise.
One question that intrigues me is just how human-readable the code produced by such genetic algorithms is. Some of the practical promise of this work is that it produces problem-solving code in ways very difficult from that of human programmers -- but how can such code be maintained by humans? It's a bit like making an engineer try to figure out how your lower intestine works.
With infinite wisdom and omnipotence and infinite resources, the Designer (or Designers) should have been able to create much more cooperative human beings. No wars. all peace.
Well, by Norse mythology, Odin, Vili, and Ve created the humans to fight in the final battle of Ragnarok, which wouldn't be much of a battle if humans just sit around all day and post to slashdot. The world is supposed to end in flames, perhaps Ragnarok will be started by a vi vs emacs flamewar on slashdot. Certainly the Norse mythology fits the human condition much more closely than the Christian mythology. Which would imply...
I wonder how they (the IDists) are able to square their ability ti "infer design" with the obvious "deficiencies of design".
If you really want to mess with the heads of IDers, ask them what they'd do if further research showed neither the Christians nor the scientists are correct, and it turns out they're worshiping the wrong gods.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You're assuming that the 'designers' intended to create a cooperative, peaceful world of human beings to begin with. The design may be deficient in achieving your criteria, but you are projecting your own idealistic design upon any 'designers' as evidence that they didn't have the kind of planning and or foresight that ID advocates advocate. All experiments come to an end when some predetermined threshold is crossed, one way or another. To be sure, if we are living in some sort of planned experiment, it probably comes to a rather abrupt end.
As for evolution and cooperation of mindless robots; there would be no evolution or cooperation if the scientists conducting the experiment had not "designed" those abilities into the robots from the start.
Somewhere out there is a darwin award for species behavior. Our award might be for inventing our own successor.
soooooo... Destiny vs. free will & self-determination?
I RTFA and think it's geeky cool just for the robots, but I wonder about how to apply this to real life. How could we use the algorithms to improve our router firewall, or kernel scheduling, or even better dynamic playlists on our favorite music players? Could we have our coffee makers figure out when we would ACTUALLY like our coffee being brewed?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Well, I can't speak for all "IDists", but based on my beliefs we are here to learn and progress: that is the whole point of our existence. Progression implies a lack of perfection, hence the wars, lack of cooperation, etc., that you suggest is evidence of a lack of intelligent design.
We are all intelligences in our own right, given the freedom to choose for ourselves and in so doing gain knowledge, experience and indeed greater intelligence. This freedom we are given means our actions can prove to be positive and conducive to progress or detrimental to ourselves or the human race as a whole.
It's commonly accepted that we learn by experience: we see evidence of that on a daily basis. Why does that suddenly seem ridiculous when it's suggested that that is what our Creator had in mind for us?
"Evolution of Communication in Perfect and Imperfect Worlds "
http://sunysb.edu/philosophy//faculty/pgrim/pgrim_publications.html
http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/faculty/pgrim/evolution.htm
"We extend previous work on cooperation to some related questions regarding the evolution of simple forms of communication. The evolution of cooperation within the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma has been shown to follow different patterns, with significantly different outcomes, depending on whether the features of the model are classically perfect or stochastically imperfect (Axelrod 1980a, 1980b, 1984, 1985; Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981; Nowak and Sigmund, 1990, 1992; Sigmund 1993). Our results here show that the same holds for communication. Within a simple model, the evolution of communication seems to require a stochastically imperfect world. "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Same story more than a year ago: http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/01/19/0258214.shtml
/.? Really?
And offtopic: $&^@%! Taco, what's up with the popups that sneak past Firefox popup blocks? I've dutifully allowed advertising to continue, despite having that checkbox I could click to turn ads off for good behavior. Do I really need to turn on adblock and noscript for
Yes, you would, but you'd also take a hit to simulation throughput, I'm guessing a pretty significant one, too. I'm not sure you'd gain anything specifically more useful than you would in a pure digital approach without this kind of low level detail, either. More interesting to add something a bit more "macro" in the sense that it's a high level behavior / feature you can see and evaluate by simple observation.
My qualifications to guess? I'm the author of "Digital Soup", a system that uses genetic algorithms to drive robotic actors ("crits") in a world where simulated food gives them energy, they can trip over simulated rocks which takes energy from them, they can bump into each other -- similar to tripping on a rock -- they lose energy in the search for food, they can mate, breed, and so forth.
You have control over breeding selection criteria, in that they (the crits) can pick from other crits that are high performing, or one of them can be, or neither, or it can be random. You can also fiddle with how the genomes of the breeders mix. You can hand-write the genomes, or preload from saved before you start, or you can generate them randomly.
Once they're let go, performance is evaluated on a per-crit basis using a histogram for the currently living crits that evaluates their energy state. You have control over the size of the living space, the number of crits... and more. You can actually watch them run around, chase food and each other, avoid rocks, etc. Generation times can be exceedingly fast. Built-in hypertext docs/help. It is really a pretty cool program.
Also... if you write a genome yourself, one you think will do well, the result is very rarely what you expect. It's fascinating to mess with.
You can get the software for free here, but there is a pretty big catch for most people: It's Amiga software. I wrote all this over a decade ago. It probably would run fine on any decent Amiga emulation, though, as there's nothing "funny" about the code or the resources used.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
According to the article they optimized the behavior by optimizing a computer simulation with a genetic algorithm. Says they ran 500 generation which is a very small number of iterations for a genetic algorithm. Then, after they had optimized the behavior, they put the control code into the robots and watched them go.
I have an even better question for ID'ers. What does THIS say about their so-called intelligent designer?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_plant
Were we created by Beavis and Butthead? I can imagine the scene on Day 3 or thereabouts of the Creation:
[God] Huh-huhuhuh-huh-huh. Hey, Lucifer. Check this out, dude. *zap!* It's a schlong cactus. ...what's a schlong?
[Lucifer] Heh-m-heh-heh. Yeah, that's pretty cool, m-heheh. Schlong.
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
Ok, what did this study teach us that wasn't learned years ago in (for example) Boids (1987), Core War (1984), and Tierra (1991)? I mean, it's cool having little bots running around a tabletop and all, but I was simulating the same behaviors on my '286 back in the mid 90's.
You assume that collective peace and smurfiness is the ultimate goal, and not individualistic peace/enlightenment/salvation/etc, which most religions tend to focus on.
I'm surprised they didn't use a Windows symbol instead of those skull and bones.
That apple looks like a familiar sticker one gets when buying a certain computer.
It slows down exponentially with time. No apocalypse there.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
A little product placement anyone? Kinda reminds me of those old films of white corpuscles attacking bacteria.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
It is Swarm stupidity!
(And slash dot might be just the place for researchers to study it :-)
I think that's the point - these robots don't have free will, which we humans allegedly have. This is why your argument is not valid - we were not designed to get along with each other, we were allegedly designed to be free to decide whatever we like. Apparently we like to go to war with our own kind.