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Robot Swarm Behavior Suggests Forgetting May Be Important To Cultural Evolution
Hallie Siegel writes: Can we learn about human cultural evolution by studying how group behaviour in robots evolves? Researchers in the Artificial Culture Project are trying to do just that. Prof. Alan Winfield from the Bristol Robotics Lab discusses his latest research on modelling the process by which cultural memes develop in robots when they pass learned behaviours to other robots in their group. Some interesting findings suggest imitation noise (ie. when the behaviour isn't learned perfectly) and forgetfulness (i.e. when the robot has only limited memory of the behaviours it is trying to imitate) lead to stronger cultural memes in the robot behaviour.
good job iam not blind, no underlined links anywhere to this comment thread, who knew that the title was clickable ?
who are the retard designers breaking all the ADA guidlines and putting 25years of usability UX/UI in the trash, have you learnt NOTHING ? , mind you if programmers had common sense SQL injections wouldnt exist anymore.
so bring the link back jerks
No.
All the failures that Hillarhea! has forgotten make her the most culturally-evolved human possible then.
The difference was clear and significant; with limited memory an average of 2.8 clusters of average size 8.3, with unlimited memory 3.9 clusters of size 6.9.
Why is this clustering interesting? Well it’s because the number and size of clusters in the meme pool are good indicators of its diversity. Think of each cluster of related memes as a ‘tradition’. A healthy culture needs a balance between stability and diversity. Neither too much stability, i.e. a very small number (in the limit 1) of traditions, or too much diversity, i.e. clusters so small that there are no persistent traditions at all. Perhaps the ideal balance is a smallish number of somewhat persistent traditions.
No shit that the unlimited memory will result in fewer clusters -- they have, well, unlimited memory so they have much more (unlimited actually) scope for creating new clusters.
This study of some hypothesis (hypothesis) is literally begging the question by answering the question with... err the question itself.
I guess this is why I dislike most models. This "study" demonstrates nothing. Absolutely nothing except that the model behaves according to the model. Maybe a new phrase is needed: "begging the model".
... are what happens to be the cheapest to select and are congruent with some property of some group of systems.
Chaos is life. Everything interesting happens on the borders of order, not in the area of order itself. Order is static.
I understand Europeans have a right to be forgotten now. How does that affect me, though, given that I have too many relevant things to do to have learned about a continent of stinky cheese eaters in powdered wigs in the first place? Very little to forget.
I recall an NPR piece about a post doc talking about ants. She said, "Ants can't be addled". She had a built a contraption that will pick an ant and place it back some 12 inches behind, making it retrace the last 12 inches of its path again and again. I think it was not computerized or robotized. Seemed like she was operating the contraption manually and after several dozen attempts (or a few hundred can't recall) she gave up. So it gels with this summary that says forgetfulness helps.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Figured it was just me, but I've seen others comment on the icons/comments covering up the article headlines.
Do you guys test this shit?
C'mon, fix it!
Live in the now, not in the past...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I'd say it would be a pretty good skill to be forgetful.
You can learn bad behaviours as well as good. And bad ones being forgotten either through memory or even straight-up death is useful to a species as a whole.
Good simple example is an animal running around loudly at predators. Good way to get itself and probably its own herd / colony killed.
Of course, you can also learn apparently good skills that later become totally useless, but they stick around anyway because there is no reason for them to evolve out.
A predator could die out entirely and a species that was preyed on by them will still be deathly scared of a trigger that predator had (say, color of fur), even long after it died.
So something that is completely neutral or harmless that may have a similar or even the same triggers to run like f@$! may be hurtful to something that could be good or beneficial to both species.
In the case of humans, we are only JUST getting over our inherent "stick with your own kind" genetics, aka, genetic "racism", tribalism if you will, the very thing that most creatures evolve in order to not be killed by hopping over to say hi to the T-rex. (not so much racism, more racephobia, well, a bit of both and more actually)
For millions of years this has led to infighting with our own species. It still happens today sadly. Humans are very still in the tribal species area even in most modern countries.
I say we are just getting over it, it could easily die out and we will continue to be afraid and hateful towards each other until only one race remains. (or none!)
Generally it is covered up in lies by tourism boards and government laws, but it won't change how people feel since it literally is our genetics to be with ones own.
Even deep down, most people reading this will likely have a preference for a mate, that is still inherently related to it, even if it is without malice.
I've talked to people in every continent on the planet (even Antarctica), and know god knows how many people from different races, religions and countries, but even I have that awful feeling buried deep down.
Our intelligence saved our species, most likely, during the last ice age. We know we had relations with Neanderthals during those times, a branch quite different to all others in the homo line. Those pressures could even be what led to our openness and cooperative skills evolving much further.
But it could have just been the ice age was anti-development. We don't know for certain.
The horror of having an immortal memory is hard to imagine, but you could estimate how awful it would be.
A million different things all competing for an action to occur.
It would be like that experimental twitch stream that had every viewer play a game, except every millisecond.
Millions of personalities all fighting for control.
Safe to say that if any creatures that did evolve near-eternal memories occurred, they likely died out quickly.
A creature like that evolving "without fault" would probably be even harder than general intelligence like ours evolving.
Better yet, frak both "share" and Cher.
Along with Jack Valenti and other big names in the entertainment industry, Cher was among the "forever less one day" proponents of copyright term extension. Normally, copyright is designed to "forget" old works so that, say, songwriters don't run the risk of accidentally making a work too similar to an older work, getting sued, losing, and falling into financial ruin. Term extension interferes with this forgetting.
Nietzsche talks about the usefulness of forgetting in The Use and Abuse of History for Life, and of course the revaluation of all values is relevant to strengthening culture/customs. Imitation noise leads to a systematic revaluation.
In most species adults die off after reproducing, probably because it helps evolution if all the old experiments are cleanly washed away.
Play Command HQ online