Evolving Robots Learn To Prey On Each Other

quaith writes "Dario Floreano and Laurent Keller report in PLoS ONE how their robots were able to rapidly evolve complex behaviors such as collision-free movement, homing, predator versus prey strategies, cooperation, and even altruism. A hundred generations of selection controlled by a simple neural network were sufficient to allow robots to evolve these behaviors. Their robots initially exhibited completely uncoordinated behavior, but as they evolved, the robots were able to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate. The authors point out that this confirms a proposal by Alan Turing who suggested in the 1950s that building machines capable of adaptation and learning would be too difficult for a human designer and could instead be done using an evolutionary process. The robots aren't yet ready to compete in Robot Wars, but they're still pretty impressive."

Comments

Evolution

[thehostiles]

actually, as of now, these robots are just programs in a physics computer experiment... so if they were to evolve to be smart, we'd have a computer virus instead of an actual robot that is evolving. I wonder, if a robot program like this were let loose on the internet, and was capable of learning... what would it learn?

Re:paper was in PLoS Biology not PLoS One

[radtea]

Compared to the rest of the summary, which says: "The authors point out that this confirms a proposal by Alan Turing who suggested in the 1950s that building machines capable of adaptation and learning would be too difficult for a human designer and could instead be done using an evolutionary process. The robots aren't yet ready to compete in Robot Wars, but they're still pretty impressive." getting the journal wrong is a pretty trivial error.

These machines were designed and built by humans to be capable of adaptation and learning, so it actually proves Turing's thesis false. They then use the adaptation and learning capability their human designers built into them to adapt and learn, but according to the very next sentence don't produce outcomes that are as good as purely human-designed ones.

So why bring Turing's name into it at all? I suspect marketing has something to do with it. Which is too bad, because the results themselves are quite interesting, although I'm curious how the robots reproduce... if this actually an evolutionary system rather than a merely adaptive/learning one. For the confused: growing children do not "evolve", except in the loosest and least interesting metaphorical sense. They learn. As near as I can tell these robots do the same thing.