In an article that will have Luddites muttering "I told you so", Technology Review reports: [edited]
A bevy of seven-inch-high s-bots in Switzerland would make Machiavelli proud, though their conduct might make us humans ponder our own behaviour, and that of future intelligent machines.
Programmed to live lives of just two minutes, these mechanical beings work together over the course of hundreds of generations to find "food" and to avoid "poison." The experiment, by Swiss entomologist Laurent Keller, is designed to help us better understand how social creatures evolve to communicate. Working at the University of Lausanne, Keller's team built cute devices with wheels, cameras, ground sensors, and a programmed "genome" that dictated responses to their surroundings.
Some s-bots had blue lights they could flip on and off to signal others. Their robo-ecosytem contained small trays that looked like ashtrays with Christmas lights that were designated as food or poison. If the s-bots found the former, they could "mate", sharing their "genome" programming so that it is passed on to the next "generation"; if not, they died off, and so did their "genes." The idea was to simulate events that would take thousands of years or longer for honeybees or humans to develop, and compress it into about a week - which for these bots was 500 generations.
The results: the bots sharing genes learned to help one another perpetuate their "DNA," using their lights to signal to their clan when they discovered food. When outsiders with different genomes were introduced, members of the clan sometimes blinked their lights far away from the food to draw the strangers away.
Keller and his team did not expect this level of sophistication in the bots' communication. They concluded that kinship and the imperative of the group to survive spurred a group dynamic that included helping one another and deceiving outsiders. Other researchers are planning to build more bots to test how other forms of group behavior might have evolved.
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