All Entries Tagged With: "Laurent Keller"

Mad Scientists Build Robots That Evolve Hunting, Cooperative And Altruistic Abilities

Do you think Robots are dumb?  Well, throw in neural networks and random mutation and things change rather quickly.  According to a bunch of Swiss researchers (who are not really mad scientists), the experimental droids eventually developed adaptive abilities, evolving a whole new set of skills such as finding their ways through a complex maze and (gasp!) hunting for prey.
According to Dario Floreano (of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) and Laurent Keller (of the University of Lausanne), in their paper published on PLoS Biology, a series of experiments in robot development turned up the apocalypse-heralding result.  Yes, piles of steel and electronics can evolve using natural selection – the way we always imagined our robot overlords to have come from.
Each robot in the experiments started out with a different randomly-generated genome, giving them unique behavior and abilities.  The Swiss team imitated Darwinian selection, allowing only those that showed good [...]