6 years ago

Robot ‘Natural Selection’ Recombines Into Something Totally New

This story is part of a week-long series on reproduction, from prenatal testing to childfree Reddit. As in, someday two robots that are particularly well-adapted to a certain environment could combine their genes to produce a 3D-printed baby robot combining the strengths of its two parents. No one, for example, designed a fungus to invade ants’ bodies and mind-control them around the rain forest—that unusual strategy emerged thanks to generation upon generation of random mutations and natural selection. When two organisms make a baby, their genes combine, but mutations also sneak in, which can lead to unique traits in the child, such as subtly different camouflage. “It gives you a lot of diversity, and it gives you the power to explore areas of a design space that you wouldn't normally go into,” says research scientist David Howard, who developed the evolving leg system and recently published a framework for evolutionary robotics in Nature Machine Intelligence.

Wired
Design Evolution Robot Mutation
Scientists Help Robots 'Evolve.' Weirdness Ensues
55 years, 3 months ago

Scientists Help Robots 'Evolve.' Weirdness Ensues

Wired
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