May 17, 2011
hamilton’s rules [of robotic] kin selection
Hamilton’s rules of kin selection, a biological explanation of altruism in an evolutionary context, has been shown to apply to robots.
Researchers in Switzerland developed a band of small, rolling robots equipped with sensors and their own “genetic code”—a unique string of 33 1′s and 0′s functioning as individual “neurons” to determine sensor use and behavior—and tasked with foraging for small “food” objects and pushing them to a designated area. Those robots that failed to collect the objects were weeded out of the “gene pool” by the research team, whereas those that were successful could choose whether to collect the food object for themselves or share it with another robot.
“Over hundreds of generations,” the researchers concluded, “we show that Hamilton’s rule always accurately predicts the minimum relatedness necessary for altruism to evolve,” they wrote in a new paper describing the results. The levels of relatedness that the researchers tested included full clones as well as the digital equivalent of siblings, cousins and non-kin.
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