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February 25, 2007
Robot Swarms Evolve
This story is fascinating and yet slightly unnerving. Swiss researchers (really?) recently demonstrated how robots can evolve and pass on traits to later generations.
The research revolves around groups of robots that start out as individuals, each with their own unique randomly generated digital genome. Their only preprogrammed instructions are to explore, find food, avoid poison and do it all in the most efficient manner. Their anatomy consists of a motor, wheels, sensors and LEDs.
Each staging area contains large red knobs. Some are food, represented by the Apple icon and some are poison, represented by a skull and crossbones. The bots are unable to distinguish which is which until they're up close but by that time, real food sources may already be depleted by other bots.
Here's the fascinating part. The bots figured out if they work together, they can locate food sources much faster. After some 500 generations later, they formed a rudimentary communication system to notify others when foods sources are found and to flag areas where poison is located. The bots that inherently had genomes better suited to working in groups and splitting tasks successfully passed on their "DNA" to offspring. Those that worked alone eventually starved themselves to death, thus removing their genome from the gene pool.
Now here's the scary bit. Some of the starving bots found an alternative way to get food. After all, they were all programmed to find food in the most efficient manner. Given their environment and situation, they evolved a new behavior whereby they lure other bots using false signals to steal from them and it seems the other bots have yet to figure out a defense against this.
The researchers caution this is no where near real biological evolution since it's infinitely more complex. However this research does demonstrate how behavior and evolution are directly affected by the environment. I believe that's another strike against Darwin nay-sayers.
via New Scientist
Posted by tranism at 7:19 PM | Permalink
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