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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."
Minor detail perhaps, but as Academic Editor in Chief of PLoS Biology I want to point out that the paper was in PLoS Biology not PLoS One ...
Well thank god we don't have to worry about that then, we can win the war by trapping the little fucker in IE6.
This kind of behavior was first demonstrated/modeled (AFAIK/IIRC) as part of the Tierra simulations almost twenty years ago. Though I don't have a reference to hand, I know it's been done in neural networks before too.
So other than the 'sizzle' (as opposed to 'steak') of doing it with robots, can anyone explain what is new here?