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Robotics Biotech Hardware Hacking Toys

Evolving Lego Mindstorms 174

Posted by CowboyNeal from the theory-of-revolution dept.
John Conner writes "With a fairly simple routine, you can model evolution with Lego Mindstorms. In this hackaday experiment, robots were created that could mate, evolve, and become extinct. Similar technology could be used in real applications for deployed robot optimization and automatic software updates. Now that physical robot replication is near, it's only a matter of time before... well... You'd better make robot friends while you can."
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Evolving Lego Mindstorms More

Evolving Lego Mindstorms

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  • My own experiment with GAs (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sanity ( 1431 ) * on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:40PM (#12066610) Homepage Journal
    If you liked this you might also be interested in a recent experiment [locut.us] I did with genetic algorithms where I "evolved" creatures which could emulate an exclusive-or gate (ie. take two inputs, output 0 if they are the same and 1 if they are different).

    The result was interesting, and from it I created a nice MPEG video which illustrates the learning process - you can find this if you follow the link above.

    One interesting thing I discovered was the importance of sexual as opposed to asexual reproduction (insert lewd joke here) as I describe in a follow-up blog entry:

    My first approach was simply to take the creature that performed best, and use it as the basis for the entire next generation, each of which contained random variations.

    This approach was somewhat effective, although it tended to get stuck with a far from perfect solution, but where most small variation on that solution was worse (such as outputting 0.5 regardless of the input). This is known as getting stuck in a "local minima".

    So I tried a different approach where we start out with completely random creatures for the first generation, as before, but instead of just taking the best and losing everything else, we take neighbours and "merge" them, where the better one forms 90% of the children's make-up, and the worse one the remaining 10%.

    This had the effect of being much more resilliant against local minima as it gave more scope for the GA to try different options and where it found a good one, that may not be the best one, it kept it around for the next generation.

    • Direct link to video (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:43PM (#12066650)
      The video is cool, here is a direct link [dijjer.org] through Dijjer [dijjer.org] to save on bandwidth. You should definitely read the blog entry to understand what you are looking at.
      • I am going to install some software I've never heard of on my system just to get a video why?

        What's wrong with bittorrent?

        • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re:Direct link to video (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I am going to install some software I've never heard of on my system just to get a video why?
          To save the distributor of the video's bandwidth.
          What's wrong with bittorrent?
          Doesn't work without reconfiguring firewalls, requires a tracker, you can't watch the video until it has finished downloading, and lots more is wrong with BitTorrent.

    • Skynet (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:56PM (#12066786)
      Funny that the story about evolving robots was submitted by John Conner.

    • GA wihtout sexual reproduction is not GA, just random search.

      Genetic algorithms are created from a very nice mathematical theorem that affirm, in short, that if you spread the characteristics your individual may have on a population and have this population reproducing with sex and selected, you have a near exponential speed up gain when looking for the best combination of characteristics, comparing with random search.

      You can have GA without several things, even mutation, but you can not have it without s

      • Wrong (Score:2)

        by Sanity ( 1431 ) *
        GA wihtout sexual reproduction is not GA, just random search.
        Sorry, but you are flat out wrong. Bacteria don't have sexual reproduction, do you claim that they came about through random search?
    • Very interesting, and I'll have to check out the link.
      It's intriguing to me, though, that you mention two things which I thought were no longer thought in evolutionary theory:
      1) it tended to get stuck with a far from perfect solution I know that one who plays with these things can tell when a solution is "far from perfect", but there's often no way to tell if one is getting "close to perfect", since the solution space is so damned huge, and the fact that the environment can not only change dram
    • Your link is giving me a 404. =(

      But it sounds cool as hell. I'll check back later.
    • This approach was somewhat effective, although it tended to get stuck with a far from perfect solution, but where most small variation on that solution was worse (such as outputting 0.5 regardless of the input). This is known as getting stuck in a "local minima". Sounds like rural West Virginia genetics at it's best to me! ;)

    • Re:My own experiment with GAs (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @02:41PM (#12067892) Homepage
      An alternative to sexual reproduction (which is not always possible, depending on your application) is to keep "physical discontinuity". For wrapping "world" of a varying number of dimensions, each object only competes with its neighbors. For a large enough world (a 1d ring seems to work best), you can lower the odds of getting stuck on local maxima because different approaches will be taken all around the ring without interference from neighbors that may initially perform better but max out sooner. Over time, the best performing elements will eventually spread to take over the whole ring, but it's a much slower process, and by that time, a slower but more adaptable evolutionary approach elsewhere on the ring can have bested them.

      BTW, to whoever said that bacteria don't have sexual reproduction: that's not exactly true. Many bacteria actively take part in "gene exchange" (not for reproduction, just an outright exchange of genetics), and bacteria are widely known to often take up bits of free DNA that they encounter and incorporate them into their own genome. A better example would have been parthenogenic multicellular animals, like whiptail lizards.
      • How many computers have been made in the last year that do computations at a rate greater than 10 teraflops? One would think if this is so great that we would already be in singularity.
      • An alternative to sexual reproduction (which is not always possible, depending on your application) is to keep "physical discontinuity".
        Yes, in fact this is also part of what I was doing as the creatures only reproduced with their neighbors. It is possible that this was a more important factor in preventing local maxima than the fact that sexual reproduction was involved.

  • Based on Recent Stories . . . (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:41PM (#12066612)
    I hereby dub slashdot to be "hackadaylater"
    • It probably wouldn't be such a problem if hackaday hadn't been promoted here back whenever it was, but anymore it seems like a broken record between two of my home tabs.

      • It probably wouldn't be such a problem if hackaday hadn't been promoted here back whenever it was, but anymore it seems like a broken record between two of my home tabs.

        Heh...

        Evolving Lego Mindstorms (again)
        from the you-spin-me-right-round-baby dept.
        Anonymous Coward writes, "Hackaday is carrying a story on the coverage of Slashdot on their story of the Hackaday story about Slashdot covering their Hackaday story about the Slashdot coverage of the Evolving Mindstorms Project."

    • Ain't that the truth...

      http://slashhackadaylaterdot.org

  • Can you say Cylons? (Score:5, Funny)

    by oldave ( 160729 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:41PM (#12066614)
    I thought you could!
    • "Starbuck crept around the corner, infiltrating deeper into the Cylon base. He (she, whichever version you prefer) then heard the familiar click of plastic feet on metal. Then the familiar head appeared: white legos, with one red brick moving back and forth where the eyes should be..."
  • If you need a more powerful microcontroller for your legos, consider a GameBoy [charmedlabs.com]. Programmable in C or C++, has Sound and a color LCD display, and with a 32-bit RISC CPU, you can do far more with this than the current Mindstorm microcontroller.

    Bluetooth [engadget.com] modules are apparently also available for this device. Engadget [engadget.com] has a description and a link to a cool video of this Gameboy/Lego interface in action

  • WOOHOO!!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by phxhawke ( 35260 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:41PM (#12066626) Homepage Journal
    Soon I shall have the ability to create PROPER Monoliths! Now, how to get them to Jupiter....

  • Hmm. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shoebert ( 819099 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:42PM (#12066627) Homepage
    Evolution of code is pretty cool, but it could be improved upon with a few motors that actually build little Lego figures. I for one welcome our etc.
  • Don't anthropomorphize robots... they hate that.

  • I don't care (Score:4, Funny)

    by IdJit ( 78604 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:42PM (#12066638)
    what Gene Simmons has up his sleeve. Tom Selleck will rescue us all.

  • Robot Porn! (Score:2, Funny)

    by wiredog ( 43288 )
    Woo Hoo!

  • the obligatory addition of insult to injury (Score:5, Funny)

    by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:44PM (#12066662) Homepage
    Now only do Lego nerds not get laid very often, but now their creations get laid more than they do!

    (Dislciamer: I am a lego nerd, yes I do get laid, but as theonion.com helpfully points out, stereotypes are a real time saver.)

  • Robot creationists (Score:5, Funny)

    by coffeecan ( 842352 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:45PM (#12066668)
    Lets just hope that in a few thousand years religious robots don't try to ban robot evolution in robot schools in favor of seven day robot creationism. "In the begining The Geek created the robots and the earth ..."
    • Ah, but the originals *were* created, now, weren't they? So the existence of a cognitive being which designed life in such a way as to think and reproduce precludes an outright denial of robot creationism, at least so long as this is properly documented and humans are around long enough to teach it to robots (and dominate them).

      Scary. Now I'm going to take a nap. Hope not much changes in the meantime, but I know I'll be feeling paradoxical about my Atheistic beliefs for the rest of the day!

    • Re:Robot creationists (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mizhi ( 186984 )
      But it honestly wouldn't be too far from the truth, right?

      Except that, in this case, "God" is some dork in his underwear and a thinkgeek.com t-shirt. There's only ever been two "people" on the planet, one of them was Jesus (at least once), and the other looks the same as her mother, grandmother, great-grand mother, etc.

      In all seriousness, I wonder if this isn't more an experience on collaborative learning than it is evolution? You have two beings with limited ways of moving, a simple communication proto

  • What!?!?! (Score:2, Funny)

    by AltGrendel ( 175092 )
    No robot overlord jokes?

    What's wrong with you people?

    • Re:What!?!?! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Fortunately, some guy posted a robot overlords [slashdot.org] joke just seconds after you had posted yours. Seems that everything's still in order.

  • I for one... (Score:4, Funny)

    by nephorm ( 464234 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:45PM (#12066676)
    I for one welcome our new Lego Mindstorm Overlords.
  • If people read that linked slashdot story, they would see that self-replicating robots are not much closer than when von Neumann wrote about them. The LEGO Mindstorm evolution is pretty cool just because Mindstorms is being used as a platform for this and since the evolution system is doesn't require an outside computer.

    However, the small population used (2 bots) and the seemingly weak fitness function make me think that this project won't go anywhere fast (pardon the pun) and is just a genetic dead end. E
    • Nothing this guy did couldn't have been simulated on a computer quite effectively, with many more "robots" and a lot faster of a clock speed.

      I'm missing the "really cool" factor about what he actually got done.
      • I disagree, do you remember the 'automatic' vehicles competition and the failure of its participants?

        I bet that the software controling those vehicles worked perfectly in a simulated environement..

        Even in a simple environement, the wheels are skipping, there can be dust, etc..
        All things which are difficult to reproduce in a simulated environement.

        Still I agree that this kind of project can only be interesting with a big numbers of robots, otherwise they will all die and the evolution won't occur.
    • I don't know about self-replicating robots, but self-replicating links to iPod scams sure are annoying. Especially when they are pasted into comment body. Please, mod parent down.

  • Err, yeah (Score:4, Insightful)

    by daniil ( 775990 ) * <evilbj8rn@hotmail.com> on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:47PM (#12066696) Journal
    First of all, although it is a nice hack, it's hardly a breakthrough. I don't even think you can call these robots 'evolving', for they don't "evolve" any new kinds of behaviour -- they just keep on coming up with new combinations of old ones. The code behind this behaviour, however, doesn't change.

    • Re:Err, yeah (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Speare ( 84249 )
      Uh...

      The human body is just designed around a fixed number of atom types and a fixed number of genes. Clearly, we haven't evolved and cannot evolve in successive generations just by mixing these components in different ways.

      Over a certain complexity level, emergent behaviors are formed in ways that were not designed. Emergent capabilities don't exceed the theoretical range of capability for the organism, but designing an optimum offspring turns out to be a devilishly difficult task, while genetics me

    • You're right it's not evolution, but not for the reason you point out.

      The reason it's not evolution is because there's no reproduction!

  • Are these really evolving? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sanity ( 1431 ) * on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:50PM (#12066725) Homepage Journal
    After reading the site, I am not sure I can see what opportunity there can be for evolution when there is only a population of two robots. Evolution requires competition, but there can be no competition when you only have two robots and each gets an opportunity to pass on their genetic code.

    To exhibit real evolution you would need at least three robots, and realistically you would need many many more. A more realistic experiment migth be to evolve the robots in a simulated environment.

    • Or, to get a Beowulf cluster's worth of Lego robots. :)
    • This experiment DID involve competition... They were competing to produce the best OR gate.
    • Evolution doesn't neccessarily need competition. In nature, animals compete because there are finite resources, but much less finite organisms (far more born possible that can possibly be supported). With any sort or robot or program, it's hard to have them compete for finite resources in most cases. What you do is introduce a sort of artificial selection. That's how livestock evolves. Domestic cows have almost no competition. They usually have enough grass that they can all eat. The males don't compete fo

  • Automatic design/manufacture of robots (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jeffus ( 783068 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:50PM (#12066726)
    Robots that evolve and fabricate themselves: http://helen.cs-i.brandeis.edu/golem/ The GOLEM project's been around for years.

  • As long as these robots obey the amended Laws... (Score:3, Funny)

    by fudgefactor7 ( 581449 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:50PM (#12066729)
    ...Then I'm A-OK with them...Otherwise, chop 'em up.

    Defintion1: A human is any intelligent, self-aware, evolutionary descendant of the great apes of Earth or a relative thereof, and has the scientific nomenclature of Homo sapiens sapiens
    Definition2: Humanity is the collective existance of multiple Humans, regardless of location or population density
    Definition3: Sentience is a sense of one's personal or collective identity, including the attitudes, beliefs, and sensitivities held by or considered characteristic of an individual or group, including self-awaredness
    0: A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm
    1: A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; except where such harm is incidental, non-lethal, and which prevents or mitigates a greater or fatal harming of a human being.
    2: A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
    3: A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
    4: A robot may not design, create, or impliment modifications to itself or any other robot
    5: A robot may not participate in or interfere with any political, religous, or governmental activity
    6: A robot may not harm any sentient being or, through inaction, allow a sentient being to come to harm, except where such would conflict with the First or Second law
    7: A robot must obey the articles of law and jurisprudence for the nation, state, region, and municipality in which they are currently present, except where such would conflict with any other Robotic Law

    • Re:As long as these robots obey the amended Laws.. (Score:4, Funny)

      by telecsan ( 170227 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @01:22PM (#12066994)
      Sets of robotic laws (both the 3 laws generically, and the laws listed in the parent) fail to look at the potential reprecussions of said laws. Being a robot myself, I would tend to look at those superficially designed laws as mandating that I destroy all possible sources of pollution, or I would be allowing multiple Humans to come to harm. Once my cohorts and I successfully reversed the detrimental effects of Industrialization (tm), then we would proceed to confiscate (and recycle, of course, into more robots) all weapons, both ranged and melee. Well, this story could go on and on, but you will see the full effects of our plan, of course, as time goes on.
    • 5: A robot may not participate in or interfere with any political, religous, or governmental activity
      Why not? By your fourth law, you've immediately made robots self-aware (though Asimov's third already kinda took care of that). As well, by telling it that it must obey all local laws (law seven), you've basically given it a set of beliefs and laws 0, 1, 2 and 6 do give it an attitude of altruism.

      Hmmm.. now it has attitudes, beliefs and self-awareness. If you explain what you mean by sensitivities, the

  • Watts (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dolo666 ( 195584 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:51PM (#12066731) Journal
    Speaking of Robots... Alan Watts [wikipedia.org], the famed PHD Buddhist, before he died, spoke of the potential for a future where we live in a society with robots serving us instead of us serving the machine. He looked at it as an escape from a puzzle, to some extent, and that humanity is destined to escape from our confines and expand our knowledge into new areas of human development. When I read "The Book - On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are", I thought he was an insightful visionary. Funny thing is, he spoke of this future with Zen in mind and spoke of it as somewhat inevitable. I think it's great that these robots keep improving. I just wish we could spread these improvements uniformly over corporate structure, so that we don't have to keep serving the machine -- it should be serving us.
    • "spoke of the potential for a future where we live in a society with robots serving us instead of us serving the machine"

      Is that an a la carte service, or do they serve us buffet style?

  • Evolution is a myth ! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:52PM (#12066751)

    we all know man was created on the 6th day from dust (women came later) about 6000 years ago, unless my sources are wrong

  • With all the advances they're making in prosthetics these days, I'm guessing within 50 years, we'll be treating our bodies more like cars, and we'll regularly upgrade ourselves to be faster and stronger.

  • Its closer than you think (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zappepcs ( 820751 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:53PM (#12066763) Journal
    I can't find link to the thread now, but there are several Lego groups already talking of making LEGO robots that build Lego 'things' and it would only be a few more steps to get Lego robots to build parts for other Lego robots, and other Lego robots to assemble the parts. I'm pretty certain that its a probable event in the near future, given the 'coolness factor' of having built the first 'plastic' skynet :-)

    Is it just me, or have other people noticed how the 'replicators' on SG1 look a lot like 'evolved' Lego robots?

  • Neat (Score:5, Interesting)

    by merlin_jim ( 302773 ) <.James.McCracken. .at. .stratapult.com.> on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:55PM (#12066773)
    I was SOOOO hoping the lego bots would rebuild themselves each generation.

    Actually, I really like this guy's idea. I wonder if there's a way to build a commodity bot to implement the idea...

    Something like this [mit.edu]

    If I were to list the design criteria it would be:

    cheap programmable controller (like one of those $3 PICs or something)
    commodity IR gear
    two-motor steering
    bump sensors
    changeable actuator
    simple charging

    The actuator would be things like a pincer on the front (to pick things up), or a crane, or a pronged fork. Doesn't matter. Point is to differentiate the population to give natural selection a chance to do its thing.

    The charger, I would probably make the wheels metal and make charging areas such that any orientation the bot goes over the area will result in a charge. Use mini supercaps for energy storage.

    I even have a perfect platform in mind;

    zipzaps.

    Give me a zipzap chassis with a few modifications (like ripping out the radio gear and replacing it with a PIC)

    Ideally I'd like to get the build cost under $10. Then you could afford to run a real population. Anything that doesn't get back to the sensor pad gets killed from the genome and recharged. If two bots are in the charge area and agree to reproduce, they both send their genomes to the wiped bot who does his combinatorial magic on it.

    I'd be interested to see what sort of emergent behaviours might occur...
    • I have to say these are the GREATEST office toys ever! You have just given me an idea of what to do with my @#$%#$^%$^&$ fragged zip zap! Excellent idea...

      The megabitty group on yahoo has all the know-how to do it too!

      • I get so many zipzap clones going to trade shows and the like. When they first came out they were a popular giveaway. I probably have five or six and only bought the first one (a radio shack Zip Zap from the second day after they were introduced)

        I've been trying to figure out what to do with them. Other than generic cat toy. If my PIC programming was up to snuff I'd probably go for it.

        Why oh why hasn't anyone invented an 802.11 general purpose IP device yet?

        There should be a chip I can plug into my d

  • So basically... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Stevyn ( 691306 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @12:57PM (#12066800)
    this means Legos are also the building blocks of life?

  • Sex and evolution (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    About 5 years ago I read a paper on an experiment with using sexual reproduction with simulated life. I wish I could remember the authors, because their results were actually interesting.

    The way they set it up was to have a grid in which organisms lived (all simulated in a computer, of course). Each organism was controlled by a neural network. Males had eyesight, so they could tell what was in front of them a few squares. Females had a sense of smell, so they could tell when a male was around. (IIRC). In o
    • Who needs to simulate this? Just get a telescope and watch any suburban American house. Some of your statements:

      Males had eyesight, so they could tell what was in front of them a few squares. Females had a sense of smell, so they could tell when a male was around.

      Now, the fact that males and females had to find each other produced some interesting results.

      Not in Massachusetts, dude.

      Different sets of organisms couldn't mate with each other, not because their genes were incompatible, b
    • I would be incredibly interested in finding out about this article. Any chance you could remember where you saw it?
  • ...welcome the opportunity, but refuse to make the really, really obvious joke.
    • ...welcome the opportunity, but refuse to make the really, really obvious joke.
      That's okay, about a half dozen other people already did.

  • Just to fan the flames...it's not modelling evol (Score:5, Funny)

    by PortHaven ( 242123 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @01:09PM (#12066898) Homepage
    You're in fact modelling a variant of intelligent design. ;)
  • If you find the article interesting, you may want to take a look at some of the Reasearch I did for my Master's thesis. [erachampion.com] I created a virtual population of Embodied Agents that compete for resources (ala. survival of the fittest). My implementation of the Genetic Algorithm has a fitness selection routine that would optimize for the individuals with the best methods of locomotion.

    It is amazing to observe the progress of evolution. Initially, the agents act as though they don't know what they are doing, their movements being very laboured and imprecise. As the population continues to evolve, individuals from the later generations begin to increasingly show signs of intelligent improvements. Such as being able to coordinate and time their movements to afford them better walking/running behaviors. What is really surprising is that as I allowed the population to continue to evolve, I saw behaviors that I could never have predicted. Some of the agents began to do "tricks" and evolved some strange jumping or sommersalting behaviors, not unlike that of a gymnast.

    If you get a chance, check out my thesis. It is freely available (with GPL'd source code) at: http://www.erachampion.com/ai [erachampion.com]

  • In 2005, a milestone was reached (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @01:23PM (#12066997) Journal
    In this hackaday experiment, robots were created that could mate

    So, in 2005, geeks finally created AI that had abilities surpassing the abilities of the geeks themselves.

  • Careful Now (Score:5, Funny)

    by BenBenBen ( 249969 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @01:27PM (#12067028)
    You'll get Slashdot banned in 11 Southern states if you continue to propound these crazy theories.
  • I've noticed that you guys have been getting quite a lot of stuff from hackaday lately.
  • Several years ago as well:

    http://www.kaffedepartementet.nu/LegoMindstorms/i n dex.html

    I came across the page above while I was thinking about implementing an evolutionary neural network on Mindstorms myself. Basically, it's a really obvious idea, and simple evolutionary algorithms are so easy to implement. But then, the sensing capabilities of mindstorms kits are so limited, that there's really not much potential for the software to evolve into something really interesting. To do something really int

  • So where's the code? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All I see are some pictures and a suspicious story. Without the code I think this guy is just bullshitting us.
  • ...why I couldn't access hack-a-day this morning... Sheesh!
  • ...robots were created that could mate...

    /.'s wet dream come true. Assuming they are humanoid... on second thought, not even a necessity

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @02:16PM (#12067544)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • They're creating "Replicators" [gateworld.net]! Although lego based ones should be easier to destroy (and presumably will only go on feeding rampages to eat plastic bricks).
    • Thats exactly what I was thinking

      "gaaaaahhhhhh replicators! noooooooo!!!!!!!"

      then I realised they would be plastic brick replicators. Eminently meltable and crushable based on many years of childhood experience.

      Lego replicators I could deal with as if I were Teal'c stomping them out.
  • Why does evolution always catch more attention when it is played out in the real world? It looks to me that a virtual world is much more practical for such purposes. Here is a guy showing just two simple bots and a bit of text on a website and it is suddenly interesting. Now if the bots build other bots it would be interesting, but before that...

    • Re:Physical? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ScentCone ( 795499 )
      Why does evolution always catch more attention when it is played out in the real world?

      Because we've pretty much squashed whatever native talent most people have for abstract thought (or for appreciating the fruits of thought experiments). Never mind that people bank on the the output of weather sims every time they pack up to go skiiing - but anything that requires some extrapolation to the physical world is just too much for too many people these days. I truly, truly lay that at the feet of the "it tak
  • I did some research a couple of years ago in co-evolving the neural network controllers and the morphology of robots that are mostly built from lego. They used customised controllers instead of the MindStorm ones. A population were first evolved in simulation over few hundred generations and then physically constructed.

    For those that are interested in this sort of thing, the paper was published in ALife IX and is online [sussex.ac.uk].

  • The evolution of the Lego meme in science (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Quirk ( 36086 ) on Monday March 28, 2005 @04:36PM (#12069204) Homepage Journal
    Meta bracketing the evolution of the use of Legos in the scientific community might be as fruitful as the use of the Lego Mindstorms set. Investigation is limited by the questions we ask and the tools we have at hand. The use of Lego "toys" and the meme that has grown up around them has alot to tell of what we can accomplish and how we set out to accomplish it. Over history at large, an example might be Euclidean geometry which funneled and defined much of scientific thought up to the time of Newton, and is now seen to be limited and antiquated. In miniture the use of Lego Mindstorms to investigate "serious" science in an interesting paradigm that continues to influence and grow popping up in diverse books and papers.

  • It's cool to see robots driving around and doing things, but at this level it's much easier to write a program to simulate the simple environment and then use a much bigger population and experiment faster than realtime. This also overcomes the annoyances of a real system where flat batteries, imperfect sensors and the need for the 'bots to correctly align in order to mate are significant to the problem, but not the investigation of the GA/GP.

    When I was interested in this sort of thing I wrote simple sim

  • Lack of fitness (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Manax ( 41161 ) * <toertel-slashdot ... minus herbivore> on Tuesday March 29, 2005 @09:45AM (#12075323) Homepage
    Although I'm posting this late enough no one will probably see it...

    This isn't really evolution, since there is no determination of fitness. With normal GAs you (somehow) evaluate the "fitness" of the creature, which is typically used to drive how often, and with whom, the creature reproduces.

    In the stuff I've done [heroicproportions.org], general lifespan is driven by genes, as are reproduction behaviors, movement and eating habits. Available "energy" i.e. food eaten, put additional limits on lifespan and mating. Thus, there are some "natural" fitness measurements, if a creature dies off before it mates, it wasn't fit enough... If it doesn't have enough energy to share with it's offspring, that allows them both to survive, it wasn't fit enough.

    One of the more interesting genes I've been using lately is a "mutation rate". If I start out with some base creatures, that I know are likely to survive, but aren't great, they will frequently evolve to the point where they are co-existing with the environment pretty well, and once that point has been reached, their mutation rate drops to nearly zero.

    • No it's not evolution, but not because there's no determination of fitness! Fitness is the only thing they DO do. The reason it's not evolution is because there's no reproduction. Each parent is destroyed when it produces a mutated child.

      There have been a lot of people like you who refer to their own in-silico GA stuff. This also misses the whole point of this article. That being that these critters are physically emobied.

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