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Evolutionary Robotics
schwit1 sends news that researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed robots that emulate natural selection. The "mother" robot designs and builds its "child" bots, and then tests them against particular criteria. The child bots that are the most successful have their traits carried on to the next generation. "For each robot child, there is a unique ‘genome’ made up of a combination of between one and five different genes, which contains all of the information about the child’s shape, construction and motor commands. As in nature, evolution in robots takes place through ‘mutation’, where components of one gene are modified or single genes are added or deleted, and ‘crossover’, where a new genome is formed by merging genes from two individuals." By the final generation, the fastest robots were able to perform their task twice as fast as the average robot in the first generation.
Give it a few million years and maybe we will see something!
Programmed for a purpose, the mother robot...
I for one welcome our new terminator overlords.
hilarious
Tips Ngeblog
This doesn't seem especially interesting if the "child" robots can't in turn produce and select their own children.
At that point, I guess it gets even less interesting, because the most "successful" mutation will be a simple one that causes the mother to select all her offspring.
Maybe they found a true random number generator particle and installed it?
You may be surprised just how quickly evolution can occur. While it does, of course, play out over the course of millions and even billions of years in terms of macroevolution, microevolution can actually be very quick to occur. This is true even when we aren't talking about biological life forms. Let me give you a tangible example. Debian was, for many years, considered the "fittest" of the Linux distributions. It was reliable and robust. Yet within the last few years Debian has switched to systemd. This in turn evolved away, so to speak, the reliability and robustness that Debian historically offered. Many people experienced severe problems with Debian and systemd, including updated systems that would no longer boot. This is where rapid natural selection gets involved. These people need a reliable OS, so many of them have just moved to FreeBSD and OpenBSD instead. In just a few short years, Debian has gone from receiving the utmost respect to being considered a cruel joke. So if we can see such rapid evolution (or devolution) take place within a few years, it is not at all beyond the realm of possibility that we'd see the same thing happen with these robots.
Except for the coolness factor how is this different from a computer simulation? The robots can't replicate without humans involved. Why would you waste your time and build robots when more in depth studies can be done in software ( you don't have to mess around with hardware, if you need a new parameter, you don't have to build pieces for your robot)
"By the final generation, the fastest robots were able to perform their task twice as fast as the average robot in the first generation."
So? How much faster than average were the fastest robots of the first generation? How much faster were the average robots in the final generation than the average of the first?
Ok so we have had computer programs designed to evolve against a standard for well over a decade. Snippets of code were simply transferred between mating pairs and the best were allowed to survive while the worst were taken out of play. Obviously the same thing could be done with robots and in fact one could use programs to evolve each and every part of a robot and then create a robot with the newly designed superior parts and testing it out. So I don't really see anything new in this at all. Matter of fact we have entertainment with "battle" bots in which survival in the arena gives feedback to builders who then make changes to make a better warrior robot. So far these devices are like drones with human operators but we should see battle bots who have only automated control built in with no humans steering the devices. Perhaps automated battle bots would be a quite measurable method of advancing robotic abilities.
This is not natural selection at all.
Sims is a MacArthur Grant winner. He has continued working with evolutionary algorithms and iterated function systems. His home page is here.
Why is Snark Required?
is reproduce itself. That is the one and ONLY reason to do this sort of research physically, and not in simulation.
Do they know what these words mean?
I didn't think Framsticks was all that new
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
They were intelligently designed. Lol.
"By the final generation, the fastest robots were able to perform their task twice as fast as the average robot in the first generation" - Isn't that kind of meaningless?
It doesn't exclude the possibility that the fastest robot in the first generation was faster than the fastest robot in the final generation!