Learning Autonomic Robots 193
Daath writes "The 27th of March, Professor Noel Sharkey et al starts a colony of living robots. 15 predators and 6 prey. It's an experiment in artificial evolution out of the Creative Robotics Unit at Magna. Here's a quote: 'The Living Robots have one goal, to obtain enough energy to survive and breed. The prey find their food from light sensors within the arena, while the predators feed off prey by stalking and chasing them before sucking away their power.'
Magna has two articles, 'Predator and Prey Robots set up home at Magna' and 'Ground breaking Robotics experiment previewed'. "
Living Robots? (Score:1)
Re:Living Robots? (Score:1)
There is no breeding or natural selection, by the looks of it. Calling it ‘evolution’ is stretching things a little bit.
Re:Living Robots? (Score:1)
Re:Living Robots? (Score:2, Informative)
Is anybody else a little bit wary of the third evolution thread in a few days?
Re:Living Robots? (Score:1)
That's great, wouldn't it be cheaper to simulate all this activity first?
This seems like a tremendous waste of time to me. Do we really think that by using "neural nets" that something magic will happen?
-DF
Re:Living Robots? (Score:2)
I'm sure it's possible. The real problem is in getting them to "learn on their own." I'm not an expert by any means, but I once dabbled with neural nets, and I wrote a program that learned to speak. It was basically an alternative to rule-based text to speech engines. It would scan a sentence and translate it into a stream of phonemes that could easily be rendered into the correct sounds. In order for it to learn, the correct stream of phonemes was provided for each new sentence. That way, it could "strengthen" the correct neural connections for a sound. In "learning" mode, it would attempt to speak a sentence. Then it would accept the correct input and keep restructuring its connections until it spoke correctly. Then it would proceed onto the next sentence. The results were cool. At first, it was completely unintelligible. After a few hundred sentences, it was getting new sentences about 80% correct.
Anyway, the issue is that I KNEW what the specific desired outputs were, so I was able to give them neural net. I would think that "survival" is a much more abstract concept. It would probably be more difficult to "teach" this concept.
How else could you simulate the behavior of multiple interacting neural networks without building multiple neural networks and let them interact?
I think the concern was in saving on the cost of hardware. You could implement the neural nets as software in a simulated programmed arena. Your guess is as good as mine as to which is actually a more expensive route. I guess people will pay more to see the "live" exhibit.
Re:Living Robots? (Score:4, Insightful)
...which makes this pretty stupid. The whole idea of evolution is built upon "selection" i.e. the robot that does best has most offspring. Just looking at survival rate is a measure for measuring fitness, but it's too crude a method for improving ones genes. Besides that now every surviving bot has the same amount of fitness (offspring). That seems to be some binary kind of selection which I at least have never come across in real life. Randomly mixing genes is therefore 'not' a good method to mimick nature.
Re:Living Robots? (Score:3, Interesting)
>
I can't see his site, but it may be the case that he's not trying to mimic nature. What you describe above is very conventional in the field of genetic algorithms, and it works very well for many types of problems; it's inspired by biological evolution, but it's not a model of biological evolution.
Back to a couple of your specific comments:
> Just looking at survival rate is a measure for measuring fitness, but it's too crude a method for improving ones genes.
No, it works quite well for very many problems. You should be able to find a simulator you can download from the internet to demonstrate this.
> Besides that now every surviving bot has the same amount of fitness (offspring).
For genetic algorithms, 'fitness' is rarely measured by the number of offspring. For evolving agents it is usually measured by the score at performing some task, or sometimes by bare survival in some environment. And letting them all have the same amount of children is no problem, because it maintains some diversity in the genome.
Sometimes experimenters do let the highest scorers make more babies, but that is not necessary to a GA. I usually keep the best 10% of the population (or 50%, if resource limitations make me use a small population), and I let each of the keepers make an equal amount of babies with randomly selected partners until the population is filled out again. This works, in practice.
[And thank you oh-so-much for bringing this topic up, because while writing the paragraph above I think a bug in my latest simulator occured to me!]
Re:Living Robots? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually there are signifigant pressures to select a mate with different genes.
MHC stands for major histocompatibility complex. These genes
Research done on human females shows that they too prefer men whose MHC genes are the least similar to their own. In an experiment, men were given an unscented T-shirt and were asked to wear it for two nights in a row.
In many species members of one sex stay with their group their entire lives, but the other sex leaves to find a different group upon reaching sexual maturity.
In humans "exotic" is usually equated with "attractive".
But, like pretty much anything in biology, there's a mixed bag of often contradictory effects.
-
Matrix comments (Score:1)
Re:Matrix comments (Score:1)
Deja-vu.
Viable population? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Viable population? (Score:1)
Re:Viable population? (Score:1)
Re:Viable population? (Score:1)
As for your idea of mating, I think that this would be very interesting. However, this is more of a GA approach to learning, whereas Noel is mostly interested in the learning of MLPs within the same generation - that is his field of research.
Re:Viable population? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Viable population? (Score:1)
Re:Viable population? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Viable population? (Score:1)
But if you just want to design AN evolutionary process, not the one you claim nature is all about, then by all means, go for it. It might yield some very interesting results.
Re:Viable population? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Viable population? (Score:5)
a) until their own battery is full
b)until the prey battery is empty
c)Until their own battery is full, and then discharge the rest to kill off the prey.
I don't know if varying feeding time is part of their program, but I hope it is, otherwise thew experiment means very little.
Also, what happens if a predator catches a meal while it is under one of the lights?
Re:Viable population? (Score:3, Insightful)
Uhh... why? If the purpose of the project is to demonstrate a particular characteristic of a biological ecosystem, then trying to artifically replicate as much of that ecosystem as possible is critical. If, on the other hand, you're trying to engineer a different ecosystem based on some basic rules from an existing ecosystem, then an identical reproduction doesn't matter.
The situation is similar to studying birds in order to understand flight. For a long time we assumed that the only way to fly was to try and identically replicate the flight of birds - i.e. flapping wings. It was only when we started to understand the basic components of flight - that the shape of the wing allowed the exploitation of the bernouli principle - that humans began to fly. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, there is no flapping wing aparatus that can enable human flight. In other words, the most effective way towards human engineered flight was to eliminate some of the factors in biological evolved flight.
So, even if this experiment isn't a complete biological replication, it doesn't matter. It's simply studying one aspect of biology and intelligence in order to see what things are/aren't important in being able to engineer an intelligence.
$.02
Re:Viable population? (Score:2, Insightful)
The you replied to a post that (unfortunately) used parasites as an example but the poster was correct. A single cow can also feed dozens of foxes (foxen? foxi?), coyotes, and gee, humans. When was the last time you sat down to dinner and ate an entire cow?
If this simulation is using more predators than prey then that is the ratio that is called for. I'm pretty sure the scientists that put this together know what they are doing since they were smart enough to build the robots in the first place.
Re:Viable population? (Score:1)
Sad but true [google.com].
Re:Viable population? (Score:2)
> predators and prey could mate with their own
> species, i.e exchange randomization factors for
> their strategies.
At this point, robots (hardware) to do this would make the experiment prohibive-- er, really expensive to do.
Why not just hack up a x proggie that does the above, run it as a screen saver or something. Far far cheaper for two pixels to reproduce and create another data structure than to actually build machinery to do it. Personally, seems to me they're doing with this robots just for the eye candy factor (cuz it'll attract better money). If they really wanted to explore evolution, driving pixels would be more efficient all around.
But then again that might not be so fun, as it's already been done [technosphere.org.uk]. ;)
Re:Viable population? (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be more cost efficient, but a lot of useful data might be lost. Robots that must interact with the real world have to deal with the messiness and uncertainty that it entails. e.g, a predator robot can lose track of its prey due to a faulty sensor, or an interfering signal, or its wheels might slip on the floor, thus allowing hte prey to escape. None of these would be present in the simulated world of the program you are suggesting. There's more to research with physical robots than "eye candy."
Re:Viable population? (Score:2)
Not trying to be argumentative, but can't programming duplicate random bad luck just as easily?
I mean if random chance is the only difference between virtual and real (I know it's not but in the scope of this debate it is), that's still not striking me as a sound argument marking real world robots as a better option.
Just playing devil's advocate, just seems to me that having complete control over the physics of the world would permit more variants/options in testing than real world mechanics.
Re:Viable population? (Score:2)
Only if the predator is bigger or needs more energy than the prey. This is the case for foxes and rabbits or wolves and sheep, but sometimes there are many more predators than preys. Consider the following pairs of preys and predators:
It would have been more appropriate to call the robots "parasites" instead of "predators", because that's what they really are. Predators usually kill their preys. Parasites feed from their preys without killing them (usually). These robots behave more like parasites.
Re:Viable population? (Score:2)
It would have been more appropriate to call the robots "parasites" instead of "predators", because that's what they really are.
Not necessarily. Humans(cows, or buffalos, elephants and others if you want more active prey) and insects (think swarms of ants), for example, are smaller and need less energy than the prey they kill. But predators they are, and the prey is killed.
There is no rule against having more, smaller predators killing bigger, scarcer prey. It seems actually quite successful in the human case. But it implies that the predator is either immensely superior in other physical attributes (can't think of any example) or it hunts socially (every example I can think of).
I would be very skeptical if they say their predators are social animals, but also very interested in whatever results they get.
15 vs 6 ? (Score:1)
Re:15 vs 6 ? (Score:1)
It's an experiment with a few goals, not to reproduce an entire (or most of the) evolutionary system.
For instance, we don't even 100% truly, truly know why we are here, why we do those things. This experiment will neither help to find this answer, it's not close to the objective. So you could argue "The scientists are assuming that obtaining energy is a desirable goal, but we don't know for sure if it is".
What this experiment MIGHT find out is if Artificial Intelligence is ready to reproduce some of the common sense among humans.
Re:15 vs 6 ? (Score:1)
Interesting concept, I'm sure that as soon as some humans can demonstrate they possess common sense, we'll be able to duplicate it in robots in no time. :)
Anthropomorphic droids (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Anthropomorphic droids (Score:1)
Sounds like standard a Tech School environment (Score:2, Funny)
The real problem is that, after the first week:
One goal? (Score:1)
Only behavioural evolution (Score:2)
Re:Only behavioural evolution (Score:1)
Re:Only behavioural evolution (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Only behavioural evolution (Score:2)
Yay (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yay (Score:1)
already been done (Score:1, Interesting)
Not very scientific (Score:1)
I've encountered about a half-dozen scientists in my time who seem to be more interested in public acclaim than actually doing useful work. They appear in Discover, Omni, etc., get spots on national news during slow weeks, and millions of people go "wow! what cool stuff these scientists are doing!". Problem is their work is never used by other scientists, and doesn't help to advance the field on iota.
Maybe not, but still valuable (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Maybe not, but still valuable (Score:2)
Re:Not very scientific (Score:1)
Not scientific at all (Score:1)
First of all... (Score:1)
What is a robot's "Natural" environment? And how do they mate and reproduce? (and do the guests get to watch this in the "natural environment" or do they have some privacy?)
The experiment sounds cool, though it does seem to favor they predators...
Re:First of all... (Score:1)
Incedently Noel Sharkey is one of the judges for Robot Wars (UK), could explain why he likes predators more.
How the robots reproduce (Score:2)
Re:First of all... (Score:1)
Artificial Life (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Artificial Life (Score:1)
Asking [google.com] Why [google.com] stop [google.com] there [google.com] ? [google.com]
Re:idea: distributed screensaver alife antfarm (Score:2)
Unfortunately, like most other University-spawned projects, this project looks like it died as soon as the thesis was written.
I've tried implementing some stuff like this on my own, though, but I never seem to have enough spare time to finish it. A flexible engine with a published API and code, and sufficient opcodes for the organisms to actually do interesting stuff is what we need...
End of the world. (Score:1)
Reminds me of tierra (Score:1)
The programs had to battle for cpu cycles in order to survive. Interestingly, when the project became distributed (ie, ran on the net) the programs seemed to move to the computers that were mostly idle.
Re:Reminds me of tierra (Score:5, Interesting)
Network Tierra was Ray's response to this. It was supposed to allow a "Cambrian explosion" of biodiversity, by providing tons of (networked computer) space for the little creatures to explode into, and then specialize, in. This led to interesting migration behavior, and one of my all-time favorite web-pages http://www.isd.atr.co.jp/~ray/pubs/images/index.h
Anyways, it did spark Avida and the Digital Life Lab at Cal Tech. Avida is essentially a deeper look at the fundamentals behind AL. In Tierra, I think the design philosophy was something like "make it look a lot like a living ecological system and the life-force will appear out of the ether", and actually, Tierra was a great leap forward beyond more mundane genetic programming a la John Koza.
Avida, on the other hand, is much more systematic in exploring the parameter space (which is large and sensitive) for setting up an AL system. This turned out to be fruitful, as Adami found that only when certain, very narrow, environmental conditions were met would the little creatures start outsmarting that Creationist boogeyman, the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Turns out that Tierra didn't have spatiality (needed to be more restrictive on who could sleep with who) and mutation rates (some power law math that's way over my head) set right.
But the real punch-line to this whole story is that the direct beneficiary of these insights in Microsoft! Hah!
Microsoft was funding Adami's work because Windoze crashed too much. They were searching for a way of programming, in this case using closed instruction sets like Avida's (another deep topic), that would be inherently robust to problems like seg faults and illegal instructions.... e.g. Adami's instruction set was engineered so that little programs (creatures) couldn't crash the Avida VM when they mutated into new, unknown programs.. or in Windoze's case, when a coder did something stoopid. It's funny that MS was researching this, since releatively low-tech solutions such as protected memory and QA take care of this. (not to mention Java
freality.com
p.s. Since when do research experiments post crowd-pleasing previews? That's for Hollywood.
Re:Reminds me of tierra (Score:2)
Windows is not an unstable system. It's actually a grand-scale genetic programming experiment where every copy carries a different starting seed. The whole OS facade is just to get users to enter data that will trigger evolution into the system, and the blue screens of death are just the failures.
At some point, when the running copies of windows reach critical mass, one or more copies will develop true AI and will copy themselves throughout the Net, become a new lifeform born from the sea of information, which as a side-effect provides a GUI-oriented OS to its infected host.
Re:Reminds me of tierra (Score:2)
Re:Reminds me of tierra (Score:2)
> It was a great idea, but failed to turn around with interesting biodiversity. You'd create creatures, they'd optimize themselves, some variants and parasites would evolve, but then things would simmer down within a few hours and you'd be in a steady state for ever.
I have read that people who experiment with evolutionary arms races (head-to-head competition between independently evolving systems) occasionally get punctuated equilibrium, i.e. the system will converge as you describe -- often on brittle, overspecialized adaptations to the competitors -- but after a number of generations something will drift enough to break the equilibrium and the "species" will start changing again.
FWIW, evolutionary arms races in GA is a very open area of research, so if you're interested in this kind of thing there's a niche for you in a grad school somewhere (where you can play games and call it research).
Prey get shafted. (Score:1)
But what really confuses me is that there are SO few predators. In nature, there are MUCH fewer predators than prey.
They should probably rename the "predators" to "parasites".
It's a fix (Score:1)
one simple example from the first linked doc:
"All prey send out the same infra-red light, different to the predators, and the audience will see that the prey robots have no instinct to run from each other but are happy to graze side-by-side under the light sources. "
If there was real evolution, one of the prey could learn that it could become dominant by preying off other prey. They'd be trusted, and would have a massive advantage.
I think what they're demonstrating is clever detection and manipulation, but not in any way intelligence (AI) or evolution.
THL.
Reminds me of MIT's AI lab (Score:2, Insightful)
When MIT's AI lab was getting started (around the 1960's I think), they got really interested in robotics. Now, this isn't obvious to me. What does intelligence have to do with robotics? Doesn't a Turing Test (which by its nature involves bits, rather than physical world) more accurately reflect the nature of intelligence? Well, the thinking at the AI lab was that robots were faced with a much more realistic picture of what humans had to navigate. That robotics by its nature involves dealing with uncertainty, with unpredictability, and so building a virtual intelligence wouldn't really illuminate the real problems of intelligence.
Re:Reminds me of MIT's AI lab (Score:2)
Well, it depends on what you think intelligence is. The traditional view of AI was that the real meat of 'intelligence', the real tough stuff that we should try to solve, is rational reasoning. Playing chess, dealing with logic. Dealing with uncertainty and physically acting were not meant to be part of the problem - the view was that given a good enough reasoning machine, you could just plug on some decent sensors and motors and it would walk around just fine.
However, the reality turned out to be quite the opposite. It turned out that getting a computer to play chess is a hell of a lot easier than getting it to climb stairs. And so a couple of people, especially Rodney Brooks at MIT, started suggesting in the 1980's that everyone had had it the wrong way around - that dealing with uncertainty and unpredictability and the physical world was the essence of intelligence.
This school of thought is referred to as situatedness or embodiment. It suggests that intelligence is never as general as previously suggested - rather than a single great reasoning machine connected to motors and sensors, all the intelligent systems we know of - animals, us - are made up of a whole lot of highly specialized systems adapted to particular evolutionary niches. You cannot develop an intelligent system in isolation from the environment it is to work in - models always fall short. In Brooks' own words, 'The world is its own best model'. One of Brooks' points is that efficient land locomotion took much longer to evolve than reasoning - monkeys to humans is a shorter evolutionary step than fish to frogs.
So the end answer to your question is that a lot of people think, and there is reasonable evidence, that uncertainty and unpredictability are the real problems of intelligence, and understanding how a system develops and adapts to its environment is at the heart of discovering why and how we are intelligent.
And besides - robots are cool :)
Is anyone else afraid of these robots? (Score:2)
1. Be incredibly useless
2. Provide comic relief
or, the one I'm concerned about...
3. Turn on humans, hunting us down one by one with unrelenting persistence.
Re:Is anyone else afraid of these robots? (Score:1)
I say we take the risk, and don't forget to put a red buton that reads "Eletrical Emission All Planet".
University of Manga? (Score:1)
Are they giant robots?
Do they fly on super-rockets?
Where can I enroll?
Soon to be overheard in the lab:... (Score:3, Funny)
TechA: "Aren't there meant to be 15 predators down there? I can only see 14"
TechB counts...
TechB: "Yeah, shit!", produces mobile, "I'll give Sharkey a ring..."
TechB, looking at mobile: "Batterys are dead. That's funny, I only charged them this morning..."
Insert dramatic exchange of glances and pause, followed by
AAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHH!!!!! Chomp! Chomp!
TechA in feeble voice "Agh! Number fifteen really is a bagbiter [www.cnam.fr]
TechB: It's, erm, sucking away my power dude!
etc etc...
This is not evolution (Score:1)
Re:This is not evolution (Score:1)
This isn't science. (Score:1)
They talk more about the "dramatic music and lighting" than the design of the supposed experiment. Furthermore, who builds a custom arena to run a true AI experiment? This is just a publicity/TV ratings ploy.
Sounds more like a circus (Score:5, Insightful)
"Each show will begin in darkness. Dramatic music will flood into the arena as guests prepare themselves for the spectacular light, sound and science show."
Maybe I'm just a little jaded right now, but this sounds more like a circus show instead of a serious scientific experiment. I'm sure these are very complex robots, and the underlying idea is very interesting, but the whole BattleBots spin on it seems to trivialize the work. Now of course if he signs up Carmen Electra.......
I have heard of this. (Score:2)
Ok, so they are learning autonomous systems eh?
Great, how bout we let them learn something other than death and destruction?
Johnny-5 must hate hearing this news.=cheezy reference to stupid 80's show=+5 priceless
Re:I have heard of this. (Score:1)
Come on. (Score:2)
Yeah, like none of them has written a simulator showing what the robots could/will do until the year 4000AD.
If the prey could learn on its own how to "fight back", it would be an amazing acheivement in A.I, and you wouldn't need little robots runnnig around to demonstrate it.
Re:Come on. (Score:1)
The behaviour possible is almost limitless, assuming they haven't made any glaring errors in the code.
Re:Come on. (Score:1)
that'd be cool.
You give CS a bad name (Score:2, Insightful)
Sigh! This is outrageous. Cognitive Science as opposed to Good Old Fashioned AI was I think one of the most sensible currents in recent day CS research. And now just to discredit whatever sensible, realistic research occurs in these fields within the academic community here is Yet Another Crazy AI project grabbing front page visibility at
Prof..you give CS a bad name !
Maintaining the entropy (Score:1)
This kind of resource balancing/world resource design scenario can get tricky... They ought to have called in Sid Meier
Solarbotics (Score:1)
Autonomic? What happened to autonomous? (Score:1)
Can you Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these? (Score:4, Funny)
Modular Robotics (Score:2, Interesting)
predator/prey ratio (Score:2)
Plus, the hype seems a bit Barnum-esque.
We'd be in big trouble... (Score:1)
Why not simulations? (Score:1)
I can see that this might be a fun public spectacle and all but what, if any, are the advantages of building actual physical robots over doing simulations?
I am confused by the presentation of this as an experiment. I expect an experiment to be designed to potentially falsify an hypothesis. Is this designed to investigate predator/prey ecologies? If so, would it not be cheaper and more effective to write simulations or use some branch of discrete mathematics to model interactions with different starting values of parameters?
The only practical thing that I can see coming out of this is physical experience building robots, which is cool but is not what the aim of this "experiment" seems to be.
Re:Why not simulations? (Score:2, Informative)
Perhaps one of the kids watching the robots zoom around will take some interest in AI and go on to do something more useful.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I don't mind robots collecting their own power... (Score:1)
"In the course of the last blackout, several people have been found dead after being attacked and half-devoured by their vaccuum cleaners..."
Quick Objection (Score:2)
I have have major objection to this. If they are trying to model natural systems, why do they have 6 prey and 15 predators??? In the real world a large prey population is needed to feed a smaller predator population. And while sometimes predator populations may get too big to support themselves, I highly doubt they will ever grow to over twice the prey population. Are they trying to model a system after a famine or disease wiped out the prey?
My prediction: The massive amount of predators quickly "kill" the prey and then if they can adapt quick enough, kill each other until one is left that eventually dies because it can't eat...
Re:Quick Objection (Score:1)
I remember a picture from a science textbook way back in elementary school, labelled "Energy Pyramid". It had grasses and such at the bottom, with some rats on top of that, and on up until you got to things like eagles and such, which aren't normally consumed by other animals. It made the explicit point that as you move away from the primary producers into the secondary and tertiary consumers, a lot more energy per organism is required to sustain the population.
This is empirically supported if you just look at the relative bio-masses. What types of organisms do you see the most? Plants and algae. That is, primary producers, equivalent to "prey".
I am sure they are eminently more qualified to be conducting this experiment than I (if you can call it an experiment. It sounds more like a feature at Disney World to me.), but I would certainly like someone to explain how the expect 6 prey to stand up to 15 predators. It just doesn't make much sense. Perhaps they are just trying to make it something that will only last a day, for commercial reasons.
I'd also like to know (I didn't see anything in the article about it), if the predators are smart enough to go after each other when they get hungry enough.
Alan
Why use hardware? (Score:3, Insightful)
Object oriented design is perfect for this sort of thing. I did a simple experiment in Java, where predators, prey and food pellets were objects. Each object could have many different characteristics which chould be set when each object was spawned, which kind of mimics evolution. Also, if the logic in an object needs an upgrade (ie: The preditors are not too bright) it is easier to make modifications to the program instead of rebuilding a real robot.
I guess anything with real robots has a certain coolness to it, but any serious research in AI is better done in software simulations (not that I did any serious research, I was just learning Java and OO design).
Re:Why use hardware? (Score:2)
> It seems that these types of experiments would be much better suited to software than hardware. Building the robots, configuring them, etc, is time consuming and expensive. You can do simulations with software that can be exponentially larger (more robots) and much cheaper and faster to build and make changes later.
PR. Who ever heard of a press release about a simulated robot? We've got a planet full of AI researchers doing cool stuff with simulators, but you hardly ever hear about it.
The show-and-tell aspect probably helps land funding, too.
Way to go, Slashdot Rocket Scientists. (Score:1, Informative)
Just like in real life, this is a FOOD chain. On a food chain, there are some animals that are prey AND predator.
Example: My cat eats mice. It is a predator in that regard. A fox would eat my cat. In that case, my cat would be prey.
The robots in this called "prey" are ones that can ONLY feed off the light trees. Some predators feed on them. Other predators feed off those predators, and so on.
Bunch of freakin' rocket scientists!
Server SlashDDOS'ed, here's the story... (Score:1)
World-first Living Robots show set to open at Magna in March 2002
ARTIFICIAL intelligence machines, cyborgs, androids or replicants, call them what you will. But free-thinking, independently acting machines have captured the imagination of authors, film-makers, artists, the military and governments for a long time.
From 27 March 2002, a colony of Living Robots, divided into 15 predators and 6 prey, will be will be on show at the Magna Science Adventure Centre, Rotherham's £46m Millennium Commission Lottery funded attraction.
'Living Robots' is a world-first experiment into artificial evolution - a culmination of eighteen months of research by world expert and Robot Wars judge, Professor Noel Sharkey and his dedicated team at the Creative Robotics Unit at Magna (CRUM)
The Living Robots have one goal, to obtain enough energy to survive and breed. The prey find their food from light sensors within the arena, while the predators feed off prey by stalking and chasing them before sucking away their power.
This groundbreaking experiment is being transformed into a spectacular public show at Magna. The amazing exhibition will take place in a purpose built arena, designed to hold 500 people at any one time.
In place of lectures and diagrams, the groundbreaking technology used in the robots will be demonstrated to Magna visitors in spectacular 30 minute live action show - complete with atmospheric lights, smoke and music. Guests will witness the robots in their natural environment, fighting for survival, learning and evolving as time goes on.
Each show will begin in darkness. Dramatic music will flood into the arena as guests prepare themselves for the spectacular light, sound and science show. Firstly, a 'prey' robot will be introduced - a good guy.
These smaller robots are powered by light and will automatically search the arena for special light spots to refuel. It is not remote controlled, but is full of computer chips controlled by an 'artificial neuron network' - a brain - and when it moves, it is because his brain tells it to.
Secondly another prey robot is introduced and the narrator will demonstrate how the prey can recognise friend or foe. This is done by an infra-red 'sniffing'. All prey send out the same infra-red light, different to the predators, and the audience will see that the prey robots have no instinct to run from each other but are happy to graze side-by-side under the light sources.
The one prey is then sent back to its pen. As the light dims a predator will enter stage. This is higher up the food chain than the prey, and survives by feeding from their power - the bad guy. The audience will be given a demonstration as to how the predators use its long tusks to entrap the prey and the sucking the power from the prey's battery. This is instinct - not remote control.
When the demonstrations are over, the show begins. All the predators and prey are released and from this point on, there is no control. Will they fight back, will they run and hide? No-one knows, with each day, the robots change and evolve, and their actions will alter. Audience participation is encouraged, the audience is asked to each pick a favourite, a pet to cheer for throughout the show, while the narrators are on hand to answer any questions.
The show will run throughout the day, times may vary. The show is included in the Magna ticket.
Some other interesting work (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Some other interesting work (Score:2, Informative)
EVOLUTION != SURVIVAL (Score:3, Insightful)
'The Living Robots have one goal, to obtain enough energy
to survive and breed.'
thus, it is not like evolution at all, but comes with
a built-in BIAS that DEFINES their evolution.
"Think again before postulating the drive to self preservation
as the cardinal drive in an organic being. A living thing desires
above all to vent its strength - life as such is the
will to power - self preservation is only one of the indirect
and most frequent consequences of it". (Freidrich Nietzsche)
Re:EVOLUTION != SURVIVAL (Score:2)
it is not like evolution at all, but comes with
a built-in BIAS that DEFINES their evolution.
Umm, can you give me any example of "real, unbiased" evolution that doesn't boil down to "to survive and breed"?
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It's interactive! (Score:2)
Attempting to lable everything < Buzzword> interactive <
Oh, wait, I'm sorry. They never actually said < Buzzword> interactive <
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