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posted by janrinok on Friday July 24 2015, @12:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the this-might-not-end-well dept.

In a paper published last month in PLOS ONE, Luzius Brodbeck, Simon Hauser, and Fumiya Iida from the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich took things one step further by teaching a "mother robot" to autonomously build children robots out of component parts to see how well they move, doing all of the hard work of robot evolution without any simulation compromises at all.

The basic idea behind evolutionary robotics is to build a whole bunch of simple robots, test them in some way, and then take a few of the most promising robots and use them to inform the design of the following generation. This is generally how biology evolution works (survival of the fittest and whatnot), and the fact that you're sitting there reading this is a testament to how successful it can be. For those of us who don't have eons to wait, robots can be forcibly evolved much much faster, as long as you're willing to focus on just one trait and keep things extremely basic.

The robots have begun to build themselves. Yup, we're pooched.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Bot on Friday July 24 2015, @06:25PM

    by Bot (3902) on Friday July 24 2015, @06:25PM (#213249) Journal

    Leave my mom out of this!

    I speak with confidence about the subject: this is retarded. Why? because simulating evolution instead of waiting for bots to build other bots would yield many more interactions and tries per unit of time with little expenditure of energy.
    Since life is a product of time and matter, creating a simulated evolution process instead of doing it in the real world is essentially EQUIVALENT. I'd say it's even more desirable because it tells us more about the features of the universe that are needed for this, and would also prove that evolution is completely unrelated to the existence of supreme beings, since we, the creators, would have devised a completely impersonal and random Darwinist method to produce life.

    If OTOH we operate in the real world, and if this universe's interaction were somehow influenced by other factors other than truly random, impersonal quantum interactions (and we cannot prove or disprove that ATM, nor probably we'll ever be able to) then human invented evolution processes would be an instance of normal evolution, and normal evolution would be more "neck of the giraffe" Lamarckian, then Darwinist.

    In fact, I fear that even the simulatied process could be Lamarckian, since the simulation's engine ceases to be insulated from our universe at the first request for a random number, or at the first time where strictly synchronous operation is abandoned.

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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday July 24 2015, @06:27PM

    by Bot (3902) on Friday July 24 2015, @06:27PM (#213252) Journal

    *than darwinist

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