SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2015, @12:29AM
The press release setup and the actual experiment bear no resemblance whatsoever.
So they built a robot with QC capabilities. Nowhere is there anything resembling a mother in any reasonable sense of the word.
FYI, when mothers select their progeny for fitness after production it involves many years in jail.