This link has been bookmarked by 7 people . It was first bookmarked on 26 Oct 2009, by Howard Rheingold.
-
-
Using robotics to study communication may help overcome some of the difficulties of performing experimental evolution with social animals, since there is a distinct lack of fossil evidence for changes in communication skills over time. Communication is very important for social organisms to ensure their ecological success. For example, University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Charles Snowdon offers a perspective on what the early environmental conditions may have been that led to the hominid communicative explosion. His research into the world of nonhuman primates suggests that while apes and monkeys in the Old World tend to be relatively silent creatures, the New World is home to much noisier monkeys such as tararins and marmosets that vocalize more frequently to “show more richness of development and learning in their vocal patterns, and that appear to transmit more information with the sounds they produce than do any of the Old World primates.”
A key reason, he suggests, is cooperative breeding, which is found in the New World animals to a much greater extent than in the Old World monkeys and apes. New World primates live in circumstances where engaging in rich communicative exchange is advantageous, because parents (and alloparents -- aunts, uncles, and others) engage in cooperative rearing and need to communicate about it. This, Snowdon suggests, may be a critical factor that differentiated our early hominid ancestors from their ape cousins.
-
“It seems to me that creating cooperation wouldn't need a changing of the rules or the evolutionary process, but a changing of the game,” he argues. “There was no preset strategy of competition, it just so happens that that strategy yielded the most points, and is therefore the one that evolved naturally. Create a game where the payoff might be greater through cooperation, and I'm betting the bots find the strategy on their own.”
-
-
Rudy GarnsThis experiment in swarm robotics shows both the coordination of multi-robot systems consisting of large numbers of simple physical robots and the evolution of collective communication behaviors. The study of artificial swarm intelligence as well as the biological studies of insects, ants, and other swarms in nature provides insight into the nature of intelligence in general, and offers an interesting perspective on the nature of Darwinian selection, competition, and cooperation.
-
Howard Rheingold"The genomes of the bots that found food and avoided poison were recombined by researchers, mimicking biological natural selection. To create a next generation bot, traits were combined and randomized to mimic biological mating and mutation. First simulated in software before using actual bots, five hundred generations were evolved this way with different selective pressures by roboticists and biologists at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland in 2007. "Under some conditions, sophisticated communication evolved," says biologist Lauent Keller of the University of Lausanne. "We saw colonies that used their lights to signal when they found food and others that used signals to communicate they had found poison."
See Also
* h+ Magazine Current Issue
* Neurobots are Developing Personalities
* Speeding Up Bacteria Evolution
This experiment in swarm robotics shows both the coordination of multi-robot systems consisting of large numbers of simple physical robots and the evolution of collective communication behaviors. The study of artificial swarm intelligence as well as the biological studies of insects, ants, and other swarms in nature provides insight into the nature of intelligence in general, and offers an interesting perspective on the nature of Darwinian selection, competition, and cooperation."
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.