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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.
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".