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from the no-way-to-charge-the-batteries-is-a-robot-disaster dept.
A computer science team at The University of Texas at Austin has found that robots evolve more quickly and efficiently after a virtual mass extinction modeled after real-life disasters such as the one that killed off the dinosaurs. Beyond its implications for artificial intelligence, the research supports the idea that mass extinctions actually speed up evolution by unleashing new creativity in adaptations.
Computer scientists Risto Miikkulainen and Joel Lehman co-authored the study published today in the journal PLOS One, which describes how simulations of mass extinctions promote novel features and abilities in surviving lineages.
"Focused destruction can lead to surprising outcomes," said Miikkulainen, a professor of computer science at UT Austin. "Sometimes you have to develop something that seems objectively worse in order to develop the tools you need to get better."
The original article from Science Daily.
The original source from The University of Texas.
The abstract of the study published in PLOS One.
(Score: 2) by gringer on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:44PM
So this is saying that reducing the effective population size also reduced the time for characteristics to become fixed in the population. That's a great observation, and sounds quite similar to Kimura's theory of gene fixation from 1962:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_%28population_genetics%29 [wikipedia.org]
It's interesting that this paper doesn't mention the word "fixation" anywhere.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by NoMaster on Friday August 14 2015, @01:22AM
Every specialty has a tendency to overlook accepted knowledge from other specialties, then uncover their own version of it and call it "proof".
Computer science is just more prone to that than most...
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 14 2015, @02:40AM