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from the the-robot-uprising-will-not-be-cute-and-fluffy dept.
Researchers led by the University of Cambridge have built a mother robot that can build its own children, test which one does best, and automatically use the results to inform the design of the next generation — passing down preferential traits automatically.
Without any human intervention or computer simulation, beyond the initial command to build a robot capable of movement, the mother created children constructed of between one and five plastic cubes with a small motor inside.
In each of five separate experiments, the mother designed, built and tested generations of ten children, using the information gathered from one generation to inform the design of the next.
Full research article: Morphological Evolution of Physical Robots through Model-Free Phenotype Development
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Saturday August 15 2015, @12:14AM
I guess its modelling something more like a beehive or anthill then.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday August 15 2015, @02:20AM
That would only hold if it were capable of constructing another one of itself before it breaks down.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by vux984 on Saturday August 15 2015, @03:14AM
Well, like many parasitic speices it relies on a host species, which it can't reproduce without. In this case, the host species is us. ;)
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Saturday August 15 2015, @12:33PM
A long time ago, some members of a robot species crashed on this planet. Noting that they had no longer the resources to repair themselves and their ship, they decided on a different survival strategy: They looked for species which had a body that is well suited for manipulating the environment; such species they found in the apes. So they took some apes, and encoded themselves in their genome, together with a genetic program that made that species intelligent and put in it the drive to explore and build things, the ultimately they'd evolve to something that would build the children of the stranded robots. Thus the humans were created, for the sole purpose of building the child robots. Also religion had its origin there; the stranded robots were the original gods. Not being experienced with meme evolution, the original robots didn't however foresee how that religion part would go. It was of course completely unintended that religion actually hindered progress for centuries, instead of fostering it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.