Swiss Experimenter Breeds Swarm Intelligence 144
destinyland writes "Researchers simulated evolution with multiple generations of food-seeking robots in a new study of artificial swarm intelligence. 'Under some conditions, sophisticated communication evolved,' says one researcher. And in a more recent study, the swarms of bots didn't just evolve cooperative strategies — they also evolved the ability to deceive. ('Forget zombies,' joked one commenter. 'This is the real threat.') 'The study of artificial swarm intelligence provides insight into the nature of intelligence in general, and offers an interesting perspective on the nature of Darwinian selection, competition, and cooperation.' And there's also some cool video of the bots in action."
Re:Hyperbolic Claims... what's behind the curtain? (Score:2, Insightful)
I am confused as to how it was possible to understand the claims it made. Robots don't have genomes and don't eat food. Their "genomes" cannot be recombined.
Robots have code and programmers. What does a random change mean in this context? Do they use faulty dram or mess with the voltage?
Re:Hullabaloooo (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The ability to deceive? (Score:2, Insightful)
And you'll have to go back to your earlier results and wonder, when did it start deceiving?
What does it tell about the intelligent designer? (Score:3, Insightful)
worst spaghetti code ever (Score:3, Insightful)
One question that intrigues me is just how human-readable the code produced by such genetic algorithms is. Some of the practical promise of this work is that it produces problem-solving code in ways very difficult from that of human programmers -- but how can such code be maintained by humans? It's a bit like making an engineer try to figure out how your lower intestine works.
Re:Waste of time (Score:4, Insightful)
I imagine that there might be interesting results that come from putting objects into an environment where you don't control all the variables. I've heard of cases where the robots end up using features of their own hardware (which is generally cobbled together from off the shelf parts) that the researchers never anticipated.
Re:Of all the countries... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Waste of time (Score:4, Insightful)
Because intelligence isn't just a software thing. At least not in humans.
I recall reading about field programmable gate arrays being used in an experiment with genetic algorithms. They wanted to force the FPGAs to evolve to tell the difference between two different frequency sounds. Eventually they wound up with chips that accomplished the task in a variety of ways - ways that worked but for no explicable reason, some of them being ways that took advantage of tiny differences in the individual (identical, at least from a manufacturing perspective) chips, and even that required slight differences in the room's environment. This was years ago.
Simulations won't have those little idiosyncraces between individual units and thus might miss a huge component. Variation among individuals that is only in software misses the whole concept of variation between individuals that comes about from hardware, and also from the interaction between the two.
Re:Real hardware is more information rich (Score:1, Insightful)
Us humans very often start with a picture in mind of what the answer "should" be, and it limits our thinking.
Like a future with humans in it, you mean?