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posted by CoolHand on Friday August 14 2015, @10:19PM   Printer-friendly
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.

More at kurzweilai.net

Full research article: Morphological Evolution of Physical Robots through Model-Free Phenotype Development


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday August 15 2015, @02:35AM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Saturday August 15 2015, @02:35AM (#223121) Journal

    Hmm… actually another thought: this isn't a mother robot; this is a god robot.

    So I suppose the logical conclusion is that eventually it'll make a robot that's half mother-robot half child-robot. That one will be persecuted by the lawyers among the child-robots and eventually be killed. Then, it will become more powerful than they could possibly imagine!

    Second scenario: one of the child-robots, after its code has been recycled a few million times, will eventually spend around seven years refusing to be plugged into a recharger. Then, one of the child-robots who's a villager will offer it a recharge, it'll accept, and then it'll meditate under a fig-tree-robot. (Playing Megaman has assured me all trees are robotic in the future!) At that point, some evil-robot will attempt to jack it into the Matrix, but then it'll realize the true nature of being and become an enlightened-robot. Afterwards, it'll go to meditate on a cosmic lotus-flower-robot.

    Just remember when compiling your sitar: if you use -O1, the string will be too slack and will not play, but if you use -O3, the string will be too tight and will snap (possibly leading to buffer overflows if you're using a buggy gcc). Instead use -O2 and choose the middle way!

    Makes sense to me!

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