Technology Blog

When we last checked in with the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Ecole Polytechnique F?rale of Lausanne, Switzerland, their evolving robots had learned how deceive other robots about the location of a resource. Since then, their robots have continued to evolve, learning how to navigate a maze, beginning to cooperate and share, and even developing complex predator-prey interactions. As before, the Swiss scientists placed within the robot's operating system both basic instructions, and some random variations that changed every generation in virtual mutations. After each trial, the code for the more successful robots got passed on to the next generation, while the code for the less successful robots got bred out. This time, however, the researchers designed a whole new menagerie of robots, including a set of hunter robots that pursue prey-bots, maze-running robots, and robots designed to deposit a token in a given area. For the first experiment, the scientists created two sets of bots: predator