Electronic Evolution: Research Show Robots Forming Human-like Societies

Electronic Evolution: Research Show Robots Forming Human-like Societies

www.dailygalaxy.com

Dario Floreano and his team at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology built a swarm of mobile robots, outfitted with light bulbs and photodetectors. These were set loose in a zone with illuminated "food" and "poison" zones which charged or depleted their batteries. Their programming was initially random, so the first generation staggered around the place like bunch of concussed puppies.

(visit the link for the full news article)

What I find fascinating about this research is the concept of evolution and selection based on groups. The effects of "natural selection" on a level beyond a single individual.

Within fifty generations of this electronic evolution, co-operative societies of robots had formed - helping each other to find food and avoid poison. Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food... Some robots advanced fearlessly into poison zones, flashing warning lights to keep other robots out of harms way.

Here's a link to Floreano and Keller's most recent, unpublished paper:
Methods for Artificial Evolution of Truly Cooperative Robots

They're exploring the evolution of altruistic and cooperative behaviour:

Another explanation for the evolution of altruistic cooperation is provided by the theory of group selection, which argues that altruistic cooperation may also evolve in groups of genetically unrelated individuals that are selected and reproduced together at a higher rate than the single individuals composing the group (Wynne-Edwards 1986). This could happen in situations where the synergetic effect of cooperation by different individuals provides a higher fitness to the group with respect to other competing groups. In those situations, cooperating individuals can be seen as a superorganism that becomes the unit of selection. It has been suggested that group selection may be a driving force behind the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms (Michod 1999).

The concept of a "superorganism" as a component of evolution is amazing! I think that human ego has in many ways prevented us from considering the extent of sociology's relevance to biological evolution. Are fields of intellectual specialization the new effective building block of human genetic evolution?




www.dailygalaxy.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

So how did they evolve? Do these robots have the ability to reproduce?

Originally posted by justsomeboreddude
So how did they evolve? Do these robots have the ability to reproduce?

Hey, it helps when you read the article in it's entirety. Those who survived had their programming passed on to all the new robots. The robots were then sent back into the pen of food and poison, those who surivived were then the next generation. Repeat that 50 times, and they found that the robots started working in teams and even intentionally putting other robots in danger to further their own survival.

reply to post by king9072


This whole thing is a hoax. A program written by a human does not evolve unless the human changes the programming, which is not evolution.

Really leaves me wanting a lot more details on exactly how this was done.

I'd like to know all the geek language coding they used and blah blah blah.

Still if it's true, that is crazy that a robot would purposefully mislead others to poison just so it could get more food.

I can't believe they are actually doing it. They are making AI!

I found some more info if anyone is interested.

lis.epfl.ch...

Encouraged by these experiments, we decided to make the environment even more challenging by co-evolving two robots in competition with each other. The Sussex team had begun investigating co-evolution of predator and prey agents in simulation to see whether increasingly more complex forms of intelligence emerged in the two species and showed that the evolutionary process changed dramatically when two populations co-evolved in competition with each other because the performance of each robot depends on the performance of the other robot. In the Sussex experiments the fitness of the prey species was proportional to the distance from the predator whereas the fitness of the predator species was inversely proportional to the distance from the prey.

[edit on 19-5-2009 by Techsnow]

reply to post by justsomeboreddude


ehh what? the code is written so that it learns,after that it comes down to passing on information that has been learned.No human needed for a somewhat simple machine to evolve into a far more complex one after the basic building blocks have been made.

[edit on 19-5-2009 by Solomons]

Originally posted by justsomeboreddude
reply to post by king9072

 

This whole thing is a hoax. A program written by a human does not evolve unless the human changes the programming, which is not evolution.

Exactly,

This is evidence of Intelligent Design. The programmer had to write the initial code. No matter how simple it is, it still had to be written by an intelligent programmer.

Originally posted by king9072

Originally posted by justsomeboreddude
So how did they evolve? Do these robots have the ability to reproduce?

Hey, it helps when you read the article in it's entirety. Those who survived had their programming passed on to all the new robots. The robots were then sent back into the pen of food and poison, those who surivived were then the next generation. Repeat that 50 times, and they found that the robots started working in teams and even intentionally putting other robots in danger to further their own survival.

So basically this makes the work of the programmers easier. Wow, it is an amazing idea, Darwin's theory has a use afterall. I wonder what would happen if this evolution is pushed further.

reply to post by Ian McLean


The concept is very interesting but does it seem a bit of coincidence that this article is being posted the same week as that of the release of Terminator: Salvation into theatres?

Originally posted by platosallegory

Originally posted by justsomeboreddude
reply to post by king9072

 

This whole thing is a hoax. A program written by a human does not evolve unless the human changes the programming, which is not evolution.

Exactly,

This is evidence of Intelligent Design. The programmer had to write the initial code. No matter how simple it is, it still had to be written by an intelligent programmer.

neither one of you has ever heard of genetic programming and any advanced programming topics I take it.

Sorry, but if anything it rather much shows how intelligent design has NOTHING to do with actual science.

reply to post by platosallegory


Wrong. One person "intelligently designing" an object is not proof of a sentient "creator of the universe". It only proves that it is possible, with understanding of the subject, for someone to make something. Your logic is a huge stretch.

However, this does show an interesting perspective on how genes (programming) passing on makes evolution work.

Originally posted by justsomeboreddude
reply to post by king9072

 

This whole thing is a hoax. A program written by a human does not evolve unless the human changes the programming, which is not evolution.

Ok it's not evolution. But that doesn't mean that it's not anything. it's still artificial life imitating choices that humans make without humand programming them to.


The Humans did not program them to act this way.......They developed it on their own after 50 generations .

You are missing the point.

I bet you think the ground isn't solid unless you yourself get to walk on it and test it out.

Have fun living that kind of miserable life.

that is absolutely amazing.

Very cool. Machines that can learn and adapt.

Neat!

I think it's great that they reacted this way after the initial programming. Again, you can't erase the intelligent programmer. The article also doesn't describe the program. It just says:

Their programming was initially random.

Well lets see it.

The article talks about neural programming. If this is the case it wasn't random.

Even if the initial program was a random adaption mechanism, it still needed the "intelligent designer" in order to evolve.

Originally posted by platosallegory
I think it's great that they reacted this way after the initial programming. Again, you can't erase the intelligent programmer. The article also doesn't describe the program. It just says:

Their programming was initially random.

Well lets see it.

The article talks about neural programming. If this is the case it wasn't random.

Even if the initial program was a random adaption mechanism, it still needed the "intelligent designer" in order to evolve.

Our modern machines are much different from humans. Our modern AI requires a programmer to give it input, but can eventually be programmed to learn on its own.

Even so, evolution works because we are organic biological organisms, not because we are "intelligently designed" machines.

reply to post by Epic Wolf


Yes, we are biological organisms that are a product of design.

The only thing this shows us that with an initial code these robots can evolve and this applies to us.

The origin of life is a code not Darwin's fantasy theory.

Originally posted by justsomeboreddude
This whole thing is a hoax. A program written by a human does not evolve unless the human changes the programming, which is not evolution.

This is incorrect
There's something called adaptive software

take voice recognition for example
softwares where you speak and it types a word doc

the software learns your speech patterns and/or accent and other variables.

reply to post by platosallegory


Besides your claims being baseless, they're outright wrong. All of the evidence points to evolution, a natural process.

Our genes evolve along with us. No designer created them, the right conditions in the early earth did.

The origin of life is still unknown, and evolution is the explanation we have that has the most real evidence to back it. It's not a fantasy, and the concept of evolution has evolved itself far beyond Darwin's original idea, it's not simply "his" anymore.