Boffins at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have found that robots equipped with artificial neural networks and programmed to find "food" start to tell lies to other Robots to keep the food for themselves. The team programmed small, wheeled robots with the goal of finding food.

Each robot received more points the longer it stayed close to "food" or a light coloured ring on the floor and lost points when it was close to "poison", which was shown as a dark-colored ring. Each robot could also flash a blue light that other robots could detect with their cameras. In a few generations, robots quickly evolved to successfully locate the food, while emitting light randomly. This resulted in a high intensity of light near food, which provided social information allowing other robots to more rapidly find the food.

However new generations of robots evolved by copying and combining the artificial neural networks of the most successful robots. By the 50th generation, some eventually learned to not flash their blue light as much when they were near the food so as to not draw the attention of other robots. After a few hundred generations, the majority of the robots never flashed light when they were near the food. The robots also evolved to become either highly attracted to, slightly attracted to, or repelled by the light.

"Because robots were competing for food, they were quickly selected to conceal this information," the authors add.