
Robots evolve to deceive one another : Not Exactly Rocket Science - muon
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/08/robots_evolve_to_deceive_one_another.php?utm_source=selectfeed&utm_medium=rss
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gdp
Seriously unimpressed.

I really, really hate it when people use very small neural networks and
extrapolate the results to some sort of biological plausibility.

Also, isn't this at approximately the level of a first AI project? Building
robots seems wholly unnecessary, because there appears to be no reason why it
couldn't just be simulated.

What was the point of the poison? It was mentioned twice and then ignored.
Turning off the light near food isn't "deception", it's just not
communicating. If the robots lured each other towards poison, that _might_ be
something to write home about.

Come to think of it, even _simulating_ this seems unnecessary, because given
the way the experiment is designed, it's kinda like listening to Captain
Obvious from the fortress of the blatantly apparent.

This really just sounds like cargo-cult science at its very worst. Perhaps
they could team up with the guy training neural networks using the bible.

~~~
muon
>> it's just not communicating

Is this a not a cunning way to deceive others?

~~~
gdp
Perhaps, but there is no "cunningness" in 11 neurons. They linked their
fitness function to the light being on. Of course successive generations were
going to use the light less because the entire experiment appears to have been
designed around the premise that they would do that.

