Thursday, February 4, 2010

Another Marker of the Robot Apocalypse

It is time I revisited one of my favorite topics, the Robot Apocalypse.

I could go into more depth about what it means to be human, tool use, and the observation by Thoreau that "Men have become tools of their tools," but I think I'll just post this.

We like to think of natural selection as, well, natural. Natural, and organic even. But now not just soft-bodied organism are being found to illustrate the quickness of evolution. Like the origional article says, we don't see robots making robots yet, but this is getting closer.
clipped from www.npr.org

Can robots live and learn by the laws of evolution?

That's what one research team in Switzerland wanted to answer. So they created a scenario in which robots with simple "neurons" were overseen by a computer playing the role of nature by randomly picking traits or behaviors that would survive or die.

In one of the most interesting scenarios, the scientists put a colony of robots in a kind of hockey rink. Some of the robots were programmed with similar genes or traits, while others were given completely different sets of genes. The scientists dropped tokens throughout the rink and decided that if the robots moved them to a certain part of the rink, they'd receive a positive point.

I was floored by the fact that the robots went from helpless to being able to coherently move the tokens without human interference. That and the fact that this "evolution" took, as Keller told me, only a few days thanks to the amazing processing speed of their computers.

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