New line in PR
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.