Nice vid from BBC showing cube robots playing a
suprisingly good game of "soccer" :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7470630.stm
This looks to be a new high-water mark for swarm
intelligence - quick, smooth, purposefull,
situationally-aware and definitely "group-smart"
even in a seemingly chaotic situation.
Now if we could attach some basic construction tools
and send a few hundred larger models to Mars with a
general plan ...
On a larger canvas, we're looking at a blur between
"Intelligent Design" and "Natural Selection" here.
While robotic 'species' are designed by intelligent
entities, they and their successors are also 'selected'
based on their performance success. It's a case of
where the minds of their makers are a proxy for wild
"nature".
Instead of being eaten by lions, laggard designs wind
up in the dustbin. Like wild 'nature', what comprises
"successful" can vary from creator to creator and from
time to time - spawing diverse niche 'species'.
The difference is that none of the 'species' become
completely seperate from the others - a creator or
creators combine previously-useful ideas proven in
different 'species' to create newer, even more capable
progeny ... imagine breeding horses with eagles :-)
In the end, this "evolutionary" process will yeild the
coveted "general-purpose robot", pretty good at most
any task (tasks which may include designing even
better robots faster and more accurately than their
organic creators ever could ?).
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