From: J. R. Molloy (jr@shasta.com)
Date: Sat Jun 30 2001 - 19:58:38 MDT
This is from last year, and still better than any movie.
--J. R.
Out of the digital ooze, robotic life
Designs that evolve without human aid
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/000911/robot.htm
By Charles W. Petit
Maybe Jordan Pollack, computer scientist and robot maker, should call his
workplace at Brandeis University near Boston something other than a
laboratory. Nest or hive seems closer to the mark. In it, he and mechanical
engineer Hod Lipson run the Golem Project, a colony of machines that evolve
and give birth to other machines without human guidance. Last week, in the
journal Nature, the pair described their work as "Automatic design and
manufacture of robotic life-forms." Life-forms? That is something that
Lieutenant Commander Data might say on the Starship Enterprise: "Captain, a
scan of the planet reveals robotic life-forms!"
So far the life-forms-bundles of white tubes resembling crazily linked
sausages that lurch, slither, and hunch their way across lab bench tops-aren't
very advanced; their only talent is movement. But neither were the first
creatures to appear in Earth's primordial ooze. Massachusetts Institute of
Technology artificial-intelligence expert Rodney Brooks calls these
machine-bred robots a step toward the "ultimate dream of self-evolving
machines." They conjure up a tomorrow in which machines breed among
themselves, whelping devices whose abilities surpass human invention-a vision
at once hopeful and unnerving.
To get machines to design other machines, Pollack and Lipson borrowed a
strategy from nature: Darwinian evolution, played out not in a warm pond but
in the software of a computer. The computer was programmed with a set of
designs that were no more than disordered collections of struts, ball joints,
and electric motors, plus electronic circuit parts for a nervous system. It
randomly altered, or mutated, the initially useless designs. Next, the
computer chose the "fittest" mutants-those that showed hints of
locomotion-while killing off the others, in a digital version of natural
selection. It further mutated these chosen few and then repeated the process
over hundreds of generations, gradually evolving more capable robots.
The designs that eventually emerged might never have sprung from the human
mind-but they do move. Some work by hunching forward like inchworms, others
drag themselves along by walking on elbowlike protrusions, and still others
creep sideways, crablike. In some cases, the evolutionary process stumbled
onto the symmetrical body form common in living things, which makes movement
in a straight line simpler.
Putting natural selection to work in a computer isn't new. Half a century ago,
the pioneering Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann imagined
self-reproducing computer programs called "cellular automata." Since then,
artificial-life programmers have watched digital organisms evolve as they
compete for survival in software ecosystems. But until now, the offspring have
lived in cyberuniverses akin to video games. Even when engineers used such
methods to produce novel designs for real objects-some jet engines, for
instance, have features that evolved in computers-their actual manufacture was
under human control.
Newborn robots- The Golem Project, however, automatically hatches the winners
into the real world. An off-the-shelf, industrial "rapid prototyping" machine
builds the kitten-size robots from plastic, following the evolved instructions
rather than a blueprint penned by a flesh-and-blood engineer. Watching the
embryonic devices spontaneously emerge and begin creeping about (after people
click electric motors into place where the computer tells them to) "is a
little scary," concedes Pollack.
The whole process takes just hours or days, compared with the million-year
time scale of evolution in nature. But other researchers say the machine-bred
robots are a case study in the power of natural selection as a design tool in
the lab and in the natural world. "It is clear that evolution can do things
that people cannot possibly do on their own," says David Fogel, chief
scientist at Natural Selection Inc., a company in La Jolla, Calif., that
evolves solutions to problems in business and other fields. He even thinks the
Golem Project and other evolution-based technology could persuade people who
are skeptical about evolution to accept Darwin's ideas. "The more people
accept evolution as a design tool, the easier it is to see that it has been
used by nature."
Whether or not the embryonic robots are plausible apostles for natural
selection, they are likely to get still more lifelike before the project is
over. So far, the evolution stops as soon as the robots step from the software
into the real world. But Stanford University consulting professor John Koza, a
breeder of computer programs, would like to see the actual plastic robots
evolve generation by generation into more adept forms. John Holland, a
University of Michigan pioneer in an artificial-evolution method called
genetic algorithms, wants the project to add cybersex, allowing robot parents
to pool their best features in their offspring, rather than using mutation
alone for improvement.
===================
Stay hungry,
--J. R.
Useless hypotheses:
consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia,
analog computing, cultural relativism
Everything that can happen has already happened, not just once,
but an infinite number of times, and will continue to do so forever.
(Everything that can happen = more than anyone can imagine.)
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