Robot Swarm Behavior Suggests Forgetting May Be Important To Cultural Evolution 37
Hallie Siegel writes: Can we learn about human cultural evolution by studying how group behaviour in robots evolves? Researchers in the Artificial Culture Project are trying to do just that. Prof. Alan Winfield from the Bristol Robotics Lab discusses his latest research on modelling the process by which cultural memes develop in robots when they pass learned behaviours to other robots in their group. Some interesting findings suggest imitation noise (ie. when the behaviour isn't learned perfectly) and forgetfulness (i.e. when the robot has only limited memory of the behaviours it is trying to imitate) lead to stronger cultural memes in the robot behaviour.
bring back the comments link (Score:5, Insightful)
good job iam not blind, no underlined links anywhere to this comment thread, who knew that the title was clickable ?
who are the retard designers breaking all the ADA guidlines and putting 25years of usability UX/UI in the trash, have you learnt NOTHING ? , mind you if programmers had common sense SQL injections wouldnt exist anymore.
so bring the link back jerks
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What's the word?
The word is love
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Surely the Bird is the Word.
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The bird is love...
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If you were not anonymous I'd suggest adding a [FUCK SHARE] tag to your .sig.
In that case, frak Cher too (Score:2)
Better yet, frak both "share" and Cher.
Along with Jack Valenti and other big names in the entertainment industry, Cher was among the "forever less one day" proponents of copyright term extension. Normally, copyright is designed to "forget" old works so that, say, songwriters don't run the risk of accidentally making a work too similar to an older work, getting sued, losing, and falling into financial ruin. Term extension interferes with this forgetting.
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Fanstastic! (Score:5, Funny)
The difference was clear and significant; with limited memory an average of 2.8 clusters of average size 8.3, with unlimited memory 3.9 clusters of size 6.9.
Why is this clustering interesting? Well it’s because the number and size of clusters in the meme pool are good indicators of its diversity. Think of each cluster of related memes as a ‘tradition’. A healthy culture needs a balance between stability and diversity. Neither too much stability, i.e. a very small number (in the limit 1) of traditions, or too much diversity, i.e. clusters so small that there are no persistent traditions at all. Perhaps the ideal balance is a smallish number of somewhat persistent traditions.
No shit that the unlimited memory will result in fewer clusters -- they have, well, unlimited memory so they have much more (unlimited actually) scope for creating new clusters.
This study of some hypothesis (hypothesis) is literally begging the question by answering the question with... err the question itself.
I guess this is why I dislike most models. This "study" demonstrates nothing. Absolutely nothing except that the model behaves according to the model. Maybe a new phrase is needed: "begging the model".
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Further, "diversity" is not the same as species abundance (and number of clusters doesn't play a part at all, and to a lesser extent neither does the size of the clusters unless there is some kind of boundary). I don't have the data but I wonder if the people running this -- what is it anyway? it's not an experiment, surely -- computer program realise that.
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Ok, I just read the how draft paper and I need to apologise: it's worse than I thought :/
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You say no shit as if it's self evident and I agree it does indeed appear to be self evident but what they showed was that the hypothesis (you'd get clustering) was born out by the study (they got clustering). If you watch the video they even state that it's a testable and verifiable hypothesis.
If you're omniscient it's probably ok to just skate by on assertions but us mere mortals need to start with a hypothesis and devise a test which either appears to support the hypothesis or clearly refutes it.
Re:Fanstastic! (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they showed that what their algorithm produced is what they designed the algorithm to do.
There is no fitness function or anything.
It's just... I'm not sure how to explain it. You can't form a hypothesis, develop and algorithm to mimic that hypothesis and then draw any conclusions because the algorithm does what it was designed to do. That just begs the question, as I initially said, and shows nothing.
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A fitness function would be meaningless in this case. The methodology is for each robot to independently mimic as precisely as possible what it observed given the imperfections in it's imaging system.
The goal isn't to train the student robot to perfectly mimic the teacher the goal is to let (and I can't believe I'm about to use this term) nature take its course and see what new memes arise and how they cluster.
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You're correct, but aren't the robots:
a) observing the scene;
b) recreating the scene/trajectory as they see it; and
c) watching again and repeating
?
1) In the case of unlimited trials what will happen is that fewer clusters will be formed because the robots will follow the "average" trajectory of noise
2) In the case of limited trials more clusters will form (and they will be closer to the original trajectory because the amount of noise contributing to the trajectory is less) and the trajectories they follow w
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Ugh... substitute "trials" with "memory"... grrr.. i.e. more trials with less memory will more closely resemble the original observation; more trials with more memory will more closely resemble the noise in the observation.
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You sound like you've read this [amazon.com] but not understood it.
Interesting. Ants have very poor memory (Score:2)
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How does it gel with the summary? I.e. how much memory do ants have -- none, 12 steps (maybe alcoholic ones do?), or unlimited? Do ants follow pheremones (unlike the robots in the summary, article and paper)?
Re:Interesting. Ants have very poor memory (Score:5, Interesting)
They may have crap memory but they have good pheromone receptors. All she was doing was forcing the ant to strengthen the path signal.
On a random side note, we have fairly large ants (1/2 inch) around here that make these 6 foot diameter circles cleared of all material. 30 or so years ago I sat with a six pack and watched them for hours on end. It was kind of fascinating.
Some percentage (presumably >50%) of the ants seemed to be driven to take material from inside the mound and deposit it outside the mound.
Some percentage (presumably 50%) seemed to be driven to pick up some material from outside and deposit it inside (probably MBAs).
Some were lazy and would either drop or pick up material just a few inches from the hole, some a few feet and some adventurous souls would wander 10 to 20 feet away.
The result was a net movement of material from inside the hole and a distribution of material that was maximized around the whole and tapering to nearly zero about 3 feet from the hole. Given monsoonal rains that tapering pretty much ensures the hole is high enough above the local ground level that flooding is rare.
Bloody inefficient but they got there.
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>Bloody inefficient but they got there.
It's only bloody inefficient to you because evolution has spend a whole lot of energy in making you intelligent enough to realize it. You also have to consume massive amount of resources to keep realizing it. The ants on the other hand are exceptionally tough individually, require very little resources, and can be bred at exceptionally fast rates. If the ants could look back at us and speak they would probably say "Look at them move all the stuff around in circles,
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Agreed, I wish I'd phrased that better. It was a wonderful case study in complex systems emerging from very simple rule sets.
What they are sying (Score:1)
Live in the now, not in the past...
Good and bad. (Score:1)
I'd say it would be a pretty good skill to be forgetful.
You can learn bad behaviours as well as good. And bad ones being forgotten either through memory or even straight-up death is useful to a species as a whole.
Good simple example is an animal running around loudly at predators. Good way to get itself and probably its own herd / colony killed.
Of course, you can also learn apparently good skills that later become totally useless, but they stick around anyway because there is no reason for them to evolve
Makes sense (Score:2)
In most species adults die off after reproducing, probably because it helps evolution if all the old experiments are cleanly washed away.