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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.
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.
Skynet becomes self aware 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th.
Mark your calendars.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.