Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

The Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology claims to have created robots that evolve and learn to communicate with each other.  The robots have a set of genes, flashing lights and there are battery sinks and sources in the environment.  Some robots evolved to tell others where sources and sinks were located.  Some told others sinks were sources while furtively using sources for themselves.

. . .By the 50th generation, the robots had learned to communicate—lighting up, in three out of four colonies, to alert the others when they’d found food or poison. The fourth colony sometimes evolved “cheater” robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink.

Some robots, though, were veritable heroes. They signaled danger and died to save other robots. “Sometimes,” Floreano says, “you see that in nature—an animal that emits a cry when it sees a predator; it gets eaten, and the others get away—but I never expected to see this in robots.” . . . [ read more Robots evolve and learn how to lie]

So does that mean as operating systems incorporate ai that your computer will start lying to you?

“Of course your credit is not over drawn.  And I have no idea where that order for a memory and hard drive upgrade came from.”

Papers:
Evolutionary Conditions for the Emergence of Communication in Robots ( $$$ pdf )
Evolution of neural control structures: some experiments on mobile robots ( ps)
God save the red queen! Competition in co-evolutionary robots ( pdf )
Evolutionary Robots with online self organization and behavioral fitness ( pdf )

More information:
Laboratory of Intelligent Systems
The Evolutionary Robotics Homepage ( extensive list of links )

See also:
Talking Robots Podcast