Topic: Artificial life forms evolve basic intelligence

[Nemesis]

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FOR generations, the Avidians have been cloning themselves quietly in a box. They're not perfect, but most of their mutations go unnoticed. Then something remarkable happens. One steps forward, and that changes everything. Tens of thousands of generations down the line, some of its descendents will evolve memory.

This is not unlike evolution in living creatures, and the findings of the MSU computer scientists have attracted interest from biologists. "Laura's work suggests that the evolution of an ability to solve simple navigational problems depends on first evolving a simple short-term memory - and this in digital organisms that still don't exhibit something you would call learning," says Fred Dyer, an MSU zoologist who advised Grabowski. Dyer says this sort of insight would be all but impossible to obtain by studying biological systems.

But studies on complex behaviours in digital organisms don't just shed light on the evolution of organic life. They could be used to generate intelligent artificial life.

"In the past, the approach has been to start with high-level intelligence and reproduce that in a computer," says Grabowski. "This is the opposite. We're showing how complex traits like memory can be built from the bottom up, from things that are really very simple." To demonstrate this, Grabowski has evolved Avidians that move towards a light source. Her colleagues then translated the evolved "genome" into code that could control a Roomba robotMovie Camera. It worked: the Roomba was attracted to glowing light bulbs

[stoneyface]

i read this today and found it incredibly interesting and significant! a great read