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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
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".
They may have crap memory but they have good pheromone receptors. All she was doing was forcing the ant to strengthen the path signal.
On a random side note, we have fairly large ants (1/2 inch) around here that make these 6 foot diameter circles cleared of all material. 30 or so years ago I sat with a six pack and watched them for hours on end. It was kind of fascinating.
Some percentage (presumably >50%) of the ants seemed to be driven to take material from inside the mound and deposit it outside the mound.
Some percentage (presumably 50%) seemed to be driven to pick up some material from outside and deposit it inside (probably MBAs).
Some were lazy and would either drop or pick up material just a few inches from the hole, some a few feet and some adventurous souls would wander 10 to 20 feet away.
The result was a net movement of material from inside the hole and a distribution of material that was maximized around the whole and tapering to nearly zero about 3 feet from the hole. Given monsoonal rains that tapering pretty much ensures the hole is high enough above the local ground level that flooding is rare.
Bloody inefficient but they got there.
Agreed, I wish I'd phrased that better. It was a wonderful case study in complex systems emerging from very simple rule sets.