Darwinbots Forum

General => Off Topic => Topic started by: Jez on February 24, 2007, 11:59:44 PM

Title: A couple of evo stories
Post by: Jez on February 24, 2007, 11:59:44 PM

Just a couple of reports I have seen recently on the internet;

Chimps hunting with spears (http://richarddawkins.net/article,663,Hunting-chimps-may-change-view-of-human-evolution,Maggie-Fox-Reuters)

Robot swarms 'evolve' effective communication (http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn11248-robot-swarms-evolve-effective-communication.html)

Title: A couple of evo stories
Post by: Numsgil on February 25, 2007, 06:03:00 AM

Both interesting.

The robot swarms...  I'm thinking maybe altruistic behavior is easier to evolve when:

1.  Food sources are effectively infinite, so you don't get less food if another bot gets more food.

2.  Your reproduction is handled by another, independant agent.

Especially #2 makes me think of ant colonies.  Perhaps ants find it easy to cooperate because they don't have to worry about reproduction.  I dunno, just a thought.

Title: A couple of evo stories
Post by: Endy on February 27, 2007, 12:08:57 AM

There's a higher level of relatedness between colony members for ants also. In the robot swarm description a similar high level of relatedness occured between the co-operating bots.

Title: A couple of evo stories
Post by: Elite on February 27, 2007, 11:07:42 AM

Quote from: Endy

There's a higher level of relatedness between colony members for ants also. In the robot swarm description a similar high level of relatedness occured between the co-operating bots.

An 'us' vs 'them' setup where you have closely related entities in a group, and several groups of entities further away genetically, in inter-group competition, seems to be a good bet for an 'altruism-friendly' environment - if a canni evolves, the tribe is compromised and gets usurped by a non-canni tribe.

So mimicing this in DB would prehaps be several colonies of dependant (on others in the colony) bots with epigenetic conspec recognition (which allows for colony reproduction), competing for limited resources.

A 'simple' and less genetically fragile antbot of some sort might give interesting results when evolved, where there's another meta-level above the level of a bot - in this case a colony.

Title: A couple of evo stories
Post by: Jez on March 11, 2007, 12:13:32 PM

Another evo story I ran across;

Robo-salamander (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6419927.stm)

Or; Robot laws (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6425927.stm)
and; Robot rights (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6200005.stm)