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.

Comments

Not really interesting until the grandchildren.

[jeffb (2.718)]

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.