DECEPTICONS: THE EARLY YEARS

[defrog]

ITEM: In a recently published experiment, robots with artificial animal-inspired brains quickly evolved to deceive one another.

The robots — soccer ball-sized assemblages of wheels, sensors and flashing light signals, coordinated by a digital neural network — were placed by their designers in an arena, with paper discs signifying “food” and “poison” at opposite ends. Finding and staying beside the food earned the robots points.

After each iteration of the trial, researchers picked the most successful robots, copied their digital brains and used them to program a new robot generation, with a dash of random change thrown in for mutation.

Soon the robots learned to follow the signals of others who’d gathered at the food. But there wasn’t enough space for all of them to feed, and the robots bumped and jostled for position. As before, only a few made it through the bottleneck of selection. And before long, they’d evolved to mute their signals, thus concealing their location.

Not that there's anything to worry about, of course. Far from it.

More human than human,

This is dF

Comments

[jasonfranks.livejournal.com]

The capacity to deceive is what sets humans apart from other life forms.

Only the chimpanzee shares this ability.

-- JF