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Real 'Robot' Wars Learning From Experience
Real 'Robot' Wars There's an extremely interesting article over on BBC News named Robot Wars For Real. It discusses an experiment with a batch of really autonomous robots, unlike the TV series ;) The robots are divided into two groups, prey and predator. Their control is based on neural networks, which are evolved using genetic algorithms. All the individuals are presumably sent to a central server, and processed there; it seems rational to assume that they're using many bots for this purpouse -- not to mention that GA are ill-suited to online learning due to potentially huge drops in performance. But I guess this is research! Another especially relevant thing to point out are the solar panels which power the bots. This allows experiments to run for days (in theory, but this is england ;) That can be a major advantage over standard robot experiments, where you only have 6 hours before the batteries run down! | Alex J. Champandard 934 posts. Wednesday 06 February, 19:05 Reply
Bid to Breed Free-Thinking Robots This is London is running a story on the exact same event: Bid to Breed Free-Thinking Robots. The article describes the experiments a bit more: the prey have to find the right balance between charging their batteries in the white light, or fleeing from the predators. | Alex J. Champandard 934 posts. Thursday 07 February, 12:22 Reply
Thinking Robots Go to War in Fight for Survival The Guardian also has a feature on the same event: Thinking Robots Go to War in Fight for Survival. In this article, the differences in structure of the robots is highlighted as a crucial element. I'm still wondering why they didn't use reinforcement learning! | Alex J. Champandard 934 posts. Thursday 07 February, 12:43 Reply
Bots Battle, Breed in A.I. Test Yet another article on the same exhibition. This one's over on Wired and seems by far the best so far: Bots Battle, Breed in A.I. Test. It goes into much more details about the actual settings of the experiments, and gives the little details I'm very fond about ;) On the technical side, the article hints that the Neural Networks may learn during their life-time. Now I'm not sure if that's claiming that NN are capable of learning within their lifespan, or if they actually do in this case. Typical GA based on Darwin's theories tend to not allow life-time learning, but Baldwinian and Lamarkian schemes do... It would be interesting to find out more about that. | Alex J. Champandard 934 posts. Thursday 07 February, 19:24 Reply