A Robot Learns To Fly

jerkychew writes: "For those of you that read my last post about the robot escaping its captors, there's more news regarding robots and AI. According to this Reuters article, scientists in Sweden created a robot that essentially 'learned to fly' in just three hours. The robot had no preprogrammed instructions on how to achieve lift, it had to deduce everything through trial and error. Very interesting stuff."

Sensationalism

[Mika_Lindman]

LONDON (Reuters) - A robot has taught itself the principles of flying -- learning in just three hours what evolution took millions of years to achieve, according to research by Swedish scientists published on Wednesday.

Ridiculous to compare prebuilt robot to evolution from some dinosaur to flying dinosaur (also known as bird). This really is tabloid headlining at it's purest.
And the robot didn't even fly, just generated some lift!
It's like saying humans can fly, when they generate 1N lift flapping their arms.

But it's great to see how selflearning robots and programs will start evolving now. I quess pretty soon computers and robots will be able to evolve faster on their own than when developed by humans.

Re:Interesting, but...

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Feedback from a movement detector told the program how successful each combination of instructions tried had been, enabling it to evolve by ditching unsuccessful ones and pairing up new combinations of the ones that produced most lift.

Sounds like a neural net with real-time recalibration to me..

Re:Interesting, but...

[spectrum-]

So they built a mechanical bird. They gave it wings and the ability to move them. Of course its going to flap them when given 20 random instructions per minute.

What I cant see is what makes that anything more intelligent than a headless chicken

They also dont take into account that evolution also gave the bird the desire to create lift and want to fly in the first place. Surely that would take as much intelligence again.

Not so...

[Anonymous Coward]

This thing was programmed to learn how to fly...so what...it didn't just decide it would leave the ground on it's own.

You make it sound like it came to it's own conclusion.

The programmers did everything but give it the end parameters...it only needed to finish the math.
Big deal....

A 747 can land itself, and it's a heckofalot more complicated. I don't see any headlines on that today.

Impressive, but...

[altgrr]

Rather than comparing this to millions of years of evolution, perhaps it would be better to compare it to a bird just old enough to physically be able to fly.

The robot was physically equipped with all it needed to 'fly'; it was also equipped with all the wires in the right places. The fundamental difference between robots and living organisms is in the thinking: a newborn bird has to forge new synapses in its brain; this robot was designed with the purpose of 'learning to fly', so was given all the appropriate connections; it is just a matter of working out what sequence of events is required. Robots inherently have some form of co-ordination; birds, on the other hand, just like any other animal, have to develop such skills.

Re:Learning to fly?

[Jugalator]

hardly learning, just a new spin on analysing the effeciency of algorithms

Well, analysing efficiency of algorithms and discarding the bad ones seem pretty much like "learning" to me.

Sure, humans aren't built to work efficiently with algorithms like robots do, but we learn from mistakes which one could call "poor algorithms with an undesired result". Humans don't exactly choose randomly between ways to do things - we perform things the way we suceeded in earlier.

Re:Well..

[Xaoswolf]

"This tells us that this kind of evolution is capable of coming up with flying motion,"
However, the robot could not actually fly because it was too heavy for its electrical motor.

This thing didn't even learn to fly, it just flapped it's wings. And what kind of evolution did it go through, it didn't pass on different genetic information until a new trait was passed on forming a new race, it just flapped it wings.

Re:Well..

[tlotoxl]

It may not have physically passed on its traits to any offspring, but from the sounds of it the program did internally pass on traits to the next generation (ie iteration of the program) when those traits proved to be successful. That's how an evolutionary/genetic algorithm works, and while it may not be evolution in the biological sense of the word, it clearly models the biological process.

Re:Well..

[Xaoswolf]

I see that as simply learning, the robot learned, changed how it thought. When I learn a new math equation, I don't say I underwent evolution, I say that I learned a new math equation. Neither the purpose or the form of the robot changed during the experiment. That is evolution, a change, the robot had one goal programmed into it, to obtain maximum lift, it had one form, a box with wings and legs. Had the robot changed it's programming to where it could drive a car, or had it actually altered it's physical form, then I could see calling it evolution.

Re:Genetic Algorithms? Anybody?

[RebelTycoon]

You forget... The robot had wings... In this case, the robot's god put them there.

And if the robot were to have built wings from available parts, that wouldn't count, as even we humans learned to assist the limitations of your body.

Trial and error is an excellent learning tool, look at how much toddlers rely on it... I cry I get food, etc.

Re:Well..

[cheese_wallet]

This evolution claim is so much bullshit. The robot already had wings, and was given the instructions on how to move them. A more accurate comparison would be when a bird finally decides to leave the nest--how long does it take to figure out how to fly then? Certainly not 3 million years. I don't know exactly how long it takes, but I'd guess that a bird does in a matter of hours what this machine did.

If the scientists threw together a bunch of spare parts, and watched as a robot magically constructs itself, decides a useful thing to do would be learning to fly, and then takes off--well that could be compared to millions of years of evolution. And you know what? It'd never happen. Not without some "divine" intervention on the part of the scientists.