artificial

In a Swiss laboratory, a group of ten robots is competing for food. Prowling around a small arena, the machines are part of an innovative study looking at the evolution of communication.

The bots get points based on how much time they spend near food or poison, which indicates how successful they are at their artificial lives.

Each can produce a blue light that others can detect with cameras and that can give away the position of the food because of the flashing robots congregating nearby. The blue light carries information, and after a few generations, the robots quickly evolved the ability to conceal that information and deceive one another.

Their evolution was made possible because each one was powered by an artificial neural network controlled by a binary “genome”.

The result was a new generation of robots, whose behaviour was inherited from the most successful representatives of the previous cohort.

In their initial experiments, the robots produced blue light at random. Even so, as the robots became better at finding food, the light became more and more informative and the bots became increasingly drawn to it after just 9 generations.

After around 500 generations of evolution, around 60% of the robots never emitted light near food, but around 10% of them did so most of the time. Some robots were slightly attracted to the blue light, but a third were strongly drawn to it and another third were actually repulsed.

Link: scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/