What must killer robots master before they become killer robots? Deceit. Well, now they are learning how to lie and cheat. In an experiment at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, Switzerland, robots that were designed to cooperate in searching out a beneficial resource and avoiding a poisonous one learned to lie to each other in order to hoard the resource. (Looks like you can add greed to lying and cheating.)

The experiment involved 1,000 robots divided into 10 groups. Each robot had a sensor, a blue light, and its own 264-bit binary code “genome” that governed how it reacted to different stimuli. The first generation robots were programmed to turn the light on when they found the good resource, helping the other robots in the group find it.

The robots got higher marks for finding and sitting on the good resource, and negative points for hanging around the poisoned resource. The 200 highest-scoring genomes were then randomly “mated” and mutated to produce a new generation of programming. Within nine generations, the robots became excellent at finding the positive resource, and communicating with each other to direct other robots to the good resource.

Here’s the catch. A limited amount of access to the good resource meant that not every robot could benefit when they found it and overcrowding could drive away the robot that originally found it.

500 generations later, 60 percent of the robots had evolved to keep their light off when they found the good resource, hogging it for themselves. A third of the robots evolved to actually look for the liars by developing an aversion to the light; the exact opposite of their original programming!

[Popsci]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Research. Be sure to subscribe to the Botropolis.com feed because it is really, really awesome. Have something you want to share? Please let us know.

3 Responses to “Evolving Robots Lie To Each Other”

1. nickless Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 3:50 pm

   Lausanne is located in Switzerland, not France.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lausanne

2. Conner Flynn Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 7:32 pm

   Thanks. Fixed.

3. Evolving Robots Navigate A Maze, Prey On Each Other | botropolis.com Says:
   February 1st, 2010 at 12:20 pm

   [...] worry about getting killed by robots. Other robots should worry too. We told you about this project last year, but it’s worth revisiting. Especially since several blogs think this is new news. Some [...]

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