Hod Lipson and his Introspective Robots

Posted 12 Oct 2007 at 23:55 UTC by steve

Natasha Dantzig of TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) writes, "We've released a new talk by Hod Lipson (Flash video format). He demonstrates a few of his cool little robots, which have the ability to learn, understand themselves and even self-replicate. At the root of this uncanny demo is a deep inquiry into the nature of how humans and living beings learn and evolve, and how we might harness these processes to make things that learn and evolve." For more see the Cornell Computation Synthesis Lab website, the Talking Robots interview with Hod Lipson, and our previous story on resilient introspective machines.

Evolutionary search, posted 13 Oct 2007 at 08:57 UTC by motters » (Master)

I think the best way forward will be a combination of design and evolution. Even within simulations on powerful computers evolution is a slow process, and so far Alife research has failed to deliver on the promise of being able to evolve significantly intelligent organisms.

Smarter evolutionary search methods, such as the MOSES algorithm used within Novamente, which try to characterise the fitness landscape could be useful for producing very adaptable machines. As is mentioned in the video the best search methods involve forming hypotheses in a non-random way (like a scientist or a detective) which can be used to quickly eliminate large areas of the space of possibilities.