Comments on: Evolving Robotspeak

By: Byron M

Byron M — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:46:26 +0000

While this is a few years late and a few transistors short, its a response to Mark, about ID. I’m not a proponent of ID, especially when its omits or ignores major info, but here’s my point:

“Another fascinating example of intelligence arising from nonintelligent components and forms of selection. Of course the ID crowd will reflexively claim the intelligence is front-loaded, that being their article of faith, despite their inability to identify exactly where this front-loading is located, or how it brought about the results seen.”

1) Intelligence is not ‘arising’, from non-intelligent components. It was put there. The only difference is you know where that intelligence was installed, and ID’ers can’t describe this in humans; not yet, and maybe not ever..but basically, you’ve just proved the ID’ers point: The intelligence existed FIRST, then came the evolution. My problem with current ID’ers is that they try to use it to still negate evolution…the proper thing to do is meld both. God created intelligence, and spirit as well as logic evolution and science in general. Before you jump on this as hypocrisy, remember, God’s logic supercedes our logic. That is to say, human logic is a derivative of God’s logic…this explains why He can move freely about our world(or not)while we cannot describe anything of His world, other than the descriptions He’s given us.

2) Can you accurately identify where the soul is located? Is it the mind? or is it the heart? Is it both or is it neither? Can the soul be detected? Or, do none of these apply because you don’t believe you have a soul? An important question to ask, since, God is more interested in your soul than your mind.

By: odis

odis — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 02:22:05 +0000

they should have tried giving each robot a visible identity (to the other robots and the identities could be per individual robot or something like family #3) and having them do the same experiment as just families, colonies, and all of them together.

By: Mark Morrison

Mark Morrison — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 04:16:28 +0000

It would be intriguing to see what the outcome of the same experiment would be if they had another distinguishable signaling light added in addition to the blue one. I would suspect given the apparent beneficial effect of identifying the “poison” as well as the “food” individually that using one for each would evolve as a potentially even more effective strategy, especially in the related and colony scenarios.
While probably not rising to the level of being analogous to politics, it might be very interesting to see if further complexity of deception would arise in various scenarios with the two signals, perhaps investigating such deception (and perhaps cooperative deception) among competing colonies or “kin” groups etc.

By: Vertebrat

Vertebrat — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 09:14:22 +0000

If they did it all in simulation, there wouldn’t be a pretty picture to attract attention. Or rather, the pretty picture would be computer-generated, so it would look like a game, not science. Simulations like this are pretty common (I’ve even done food-seeking robots with random neural nets!) but we rarely think of them as worth turning into experiments. The reason this one is interesting isn’t the glowing robots. It’s that it’s a quasi-empirical test of group selection. That’s something you can’t easily get from nature.

(Isn’t everything better with robots?)

By: Brian

Brian — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 05:37:26 +0000

What I’m wondering is, why in the world did they go to the trouble of using robots? The same thing could have been accomplished much more cheaply and easily on a computer simulation (and they seemed to rely heavily on computer simulation in the training of their neural networks anyway).

By: MartinC

MartinC — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:31:25 +0000

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

By: John X

John X — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 14:33:35 +0000

Ross. Your article reference is appropriate. But, the ID people should read it also. Dr. Quinn refers to Occam’s razor in contending that one should not invent additional assumptions when existing science explains the observations weighs against ID in arguing this experiment. I suggest the experimenters were testing the different evolution directions rather than “forcing” them.

In any event, it is difficult to convey scientific “beliefs” without utilizing the lay or more common use of words.

Carl, again, very nice article.

By: Ross

Ross — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 02:27:53 +0000

Very interesting work. I would like to see how it worked with a richer environment (muliple food sources, predators…) However, there are some uses of terminology in the article that could be mis-interpreted by IDiots. In particular, the concept here of attempting to force evolution in a particular direction, whereas Darwinian evolution moves a species to increased fitness for the environment in which it finds itself. It could be possible to interpret this research as evidence of the hand of a designer in the creation of humans.

I found this article, from the field of physics, a useful guide to using scientific terms with lay audiences:

http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-60/iss-1/8_1.html

By: Carl Zimmer

Carl Zimmer — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 15:09:31 +0000

This is the link to the pdf for the supplemental figures: http://www.current-biology.com/cgi/content/full/CURBIO/unassign/PIIS0960982207009281/mmc1.pdf

By: Noumenon

Noumenon — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 14:06:48 +0000

At the end of the PDF it says,

Supplemental Data include additional Experimental Procedures,
two figures, and one movie and are available with this article online
at http://www.current-biology.com/cgi/content/full/17/6/—/
DC1/.

I wanted to look at supplemental figure S1, but there’s nothing at all on that page besides an ad and a menu bar.

By: gabe

gabe — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 01:39:24 +0000

Fascinating

By: Doug

Doug — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 18:58:54 +0000

Although this may be “a classic prisoners-dilemma-type situation”, there is another possibility.

This game may be more consistent with pursuit-evasion [in equilibria] of chapter 8 in Tamer Basar, Geert Jan Olsder, Dynamic Noncooperative Game Theory (Classics in Applied Mathematics) (Paperback) [inside viewable on Amazon]; with definitions and proofs.

Much of work in robotitc algorithms is done with pursuit-evasion games.

See Nature editor’s summary 25 January 2007 for

News and Views: Mathematical physics: On the right scent
Searching for the source of a smell is hampered by the absence of pervasive local cues that point the searcher in the right direction. A strategy based on maximal information could show the way.
Dominique Martinez doi:10.1038/445371a
and
Letter: ‘Infotaxis’ as a strategy for searching without gradients
Massimo Vergassola, Emmanuel Villermaux and Boris I. Shraiman
doi:10.1038/nature05464
[Nature 25 January 2007 Volume 445 Number 7126, pp339-458]
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal…070125-10.html

By: MarkP

MarkP — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 10:16:40 +0000

Another fascinating example of intelligence arising from nonintelligent components and forms of selection. Of course the ID crowd will reflexively claim the intelligence is front-loaded, that being their article of faith, despite their inability to identify exactly where this front-loading is located, or how it brought about the results seen.

The IDers are like psychics in this regard. If their hypothesis were true, they should be able to examine the robot programming, and the planned selection criteria, and predict, with great precision, the resulting behavior. Instead, all they can provide is after-the-fact rationalizing, like with Dave Thomas’ experiment with evolutionary algorithms and Steiner trees.

By: John Hynes

John Hynes — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 09:57:33 +0000

The Cylons were created by Man. They evolved. They rebelled. There are many copies. And they have a plan.

By: Nick (Matzke)

Nick (Matzke) — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 09:02:44 +0000

In their individualistic scramble, they ended up performing disastrously. Unlike in the other versions of the experiments, the deceptive robots actually scored worse than they did without the chance to evolve communication.

This is a classic prisoners-dilemma-type situation (and a classic concept in the study of altruism).