First development of robots capable of designing and creating other robots
Tamara Traubman
For the first time, scientists succeeded in producing a robot that evolved through an evolutionary process and created another robot, without significant human intervention. The achievement could lead to a large decrease in the development and production costs of robots capable of performing simple tasks. It is possible that in the distant future - at least a few more decades - more sophisticated robots will be able to truly meet the definition of "artificial life" - to be sent into space, reproduce and develop, and create improved offspring of themselves that will adapt to the new environment.
This year a heated debate arose in the USA, when Bill Joy, a senior scientist at the computer giant "Sun" published an article in "Wired" magazine under the title "The future does not need us". He claimed that scientists may have to stop developing the technology of genetic engineering and artificial life, because in his opinion, one day these technologies may lead to the existence of cruel creatures that will surpass man in their abilities, and cause his extinction. The researchers who developed the robot, Dr. Hood Lipson and Dr. Jordan Pollack of Brandeis University, say Joy's gloomy scenario is very far from reality. Yesterday, a detailed report on their experiments was published in the scientific journal "Nature".
Although the robots look like little plastic toys - and the only thing they know how to do is walk - experts have defined them as an important step in the emerging scientific field of artificial life. "This is a long-awaited necessary step on the way to the final dream of machines that develop independently," wrote Dr. Rodney Brooks, an expert in the field of robotics at MIT, in a commentary accompanying the study.
According to scientists involved in the development of artificial intelligence and life, the traditional robotics industry has reached a dead end. "A lot of people in the industry build very sophisticated robots but don't know how to make them intelligent," says Dr. Lipson, an Israeli-American graduate of the Technion. As an example, he cites the Sojourner spacecraft: this little robot, one of the most sophisticated robots ever made, roamed the Martian soil three years ago and sent images back to Earth. "Lots of people worked on him, but he has the intelligence of a cockroach," adds Dr. Lipson. "This is an excellent example that we have a very difficult problem to design a robot brain. From a mechanical point of view, we have made great progress, but in terms of intelligence, we are very, very behind."
According to the discipline of artificial intelligence, the life that the robots are supposed to imitate is too complex, and it is difficult to assume that decades of biological research will be able to understand what is actually necessary to think or act like a human. The key idea is to simply use the same tool that was used for the development of life - evolution - and apply it to the robots. Another principle of the discipline is that, unlike orthodox robotics, the "brain" and the body of the robot are developed together, as in nature.
The development of the robots was done on the computer, the computer sent the most successful robots to a creation machine that built them in reality. In the first step, the researchers gave the virtual robots three building blocks: rods, muscles and artificial neurons. The robots could use them in any possible way, lengthen and shorten the rods, get more muscles, nerve cells and synapses connecting them. The virtual robots, as well as all creatures on earth, had no idea what a successful robot should look like. They just multiplied, until the computer ordered them to move to the production machine.
Every time a new generation was created, a random mutation occurred in it that changed it slightly. This process is similar to the evolutionary process in nature, where mutations occur randomly and change different characteristics in animals or plants. Most of the mutations have no meaning, but some give the organism greater adaptation to its environment.
The equivalent of "natural selection" in the computer was determined according to the movement speed of the robots. The robots that moved faster, replicated more times, and therefore also evolved faster. After 300 to 600 generations of virtual evolution, only the fastest robots remain descendants.
At this point, the computer sent the design to a XNUMXD printer that "printed" the robot layer by layer. So the researchers had to intervene a bit and added an engine to the robots. But according to Dr. Lipson, today printers are being developed that can print more than one material, and in the end it is even possible that they will be able to produce the electric circuits and the motor of the robots as well.
Lipson and Polk repeated the whole process several times, and each time evolution provided a different solution. One of the robots had the shape of an arrow and dragged itself, following a shape similar to that of a crab and another robot spread and contracted its limbs to move forward. They were surprised to discover that the random evolutionary process in which the robots were created sometimes led to the development of quite symmetrical robots - a feature that allows for efficient movement. "This is something that really surprised us, because we did not include symmetry as a criterion," says Dr. Lipson. "Things known to engineers, fundamental laws in engineering, are discovered unconsciously by the system as well."
An interesting fact is that the course of evolution of the virtual robots took place in a manner reminiscent of the evolution of biological life. The development of robots was not continuous, but occurred in jumps, and as the development progressed, more time passed between jumps.
Dr. Lipson says that theoretical calculations show that the critical process in evolution - the one that encourages progress - is cooperation and competition. Now Lipson and Polk are trying to create robots that can even create mutual relationships between them, and eventually even cooperate with each other.
On the laboratory's website you can watch videos and animations of the robots and download screen saver software that runs the evolution of the robots. His address:
http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/pr/golem
{Appeared in Haaretz newspaper, 1/9/2000}
The knowledge site was part of the IOL portal from the Haaretz group during the period in question
The knowledge site was until the end of 2002 part of the IOL portal from the Haaretz group
