Left To Their Own Devices, Robots Evolve Into Diverse Populations
Eat or Mate? Two robots spot one another across a field of six batteries. Stefan Elfwing and Kenji Doya, PLOS ONE, 2014 There are a few different ways you can study evolution. You could live for months at a time in a tent on tiny island with an isolated population and no fresh water. Or you could program a computer model and some squirrel-sized robots to act out a thousand generations of sex and death in the comfort of your own lab. Two researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology recently chose the latter option. With their model and robots, they were able to demonstrate how two different mating strategies arise in one population. Upon first glance, you would think that "survival of the fittest" would eventually create one optimal strategy....