| As I was at the airport getting ready to fly home, I decided to buy a "Discover" magazine. It's the January 2008 copy, "The Year In Science: 100 Top Science Stories of 2007. (Check here for the website) If you get a chance, please pick this up and read through it. LOTS of great stuff in there! Anyways, #80 and #84 were interesting to me, pages 62 and 63 respectively...and I got the urge to share this. Just take it for what you will.
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80: Robots Evolve and Learn to Lie
Robots can evolve to communicate with each other, to help, and even to deceive each other, according to Dario Floreano of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Floreano and his colleagues outfitted robots with light sensors, rings of blue light, and wheels and placed them in habitats furnished with glowing "food sources" and patches of "poison" that recharged or drained their batteries. Their neural circuitry was programmed with just 30 "genes", elements of software code that determined how much they sensed light and how they responded when they did. The robots where initially programmed both to light up randomly and to move randomly when they sense light.
To create the next generation of robots, Floreano recombined the genes of those that proved fittest--those that had managed to get the biggest charge out of the food source.
The resulting code (with a little mutation added in the form of a random change) was downloaded into the robots to make what were, in essence, offspring. Then they were released into their artificial habitat. "We set up a situation common in nature--foraging with uncertainty," Floreano say. "You have to find food, but you don't know what food is; if you eat poison, you die." Four different types of colonies of robots were allowed to eat, reproduce, and expire.
By the 50th generation, the robots had learned to communicate--lighting up, in three out of four colonies, to alert the others when they'd found food or poison. The fourth colony sometimes evolved "cheater" robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink.
Some robots, though, were veritable heroes. They signaled danger and died to save other robots. "Sometimes," Floreano says, "you see that in nature--an animal that emits a cry when it sees a predator; it gets eaten, and the others get away--but I never expected to see this in robots
--Michael Abrams
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84: Chimps Show Altruistic Streak
For years, lacking evidence to the contrary, most scientists had assumed that altruism is unique to humans. Sure, other primates groom each other and even share food, but this kind of helping could be chalked up to selfish motives--either to benefit close relatives who share their genes or to get an immediate reward. In June, however, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology reported the first experimental evidence of spontaneous altruism in chimpanzees, toward both non-related chimps and humans.
In one experiment done with semifree-ranging chimps in Uganda, a chimp struggled to open a door locked by a chain. The researchers wanted to see if a second chimp would release the chain to help the first get food. Three quarters of the time, the chimps in a position to help did just that. "The crucial things her is they help without any expectation of being rewarded, because they don't benefit from their helping," lead researcher Felix Warneken explains.
The same pattern showed up in a similar experiment with chimpanzees and humans: When a person with whom they had no prior relationship struggled to reach a stick, the chimps handed it to the person even when it required climbing up to a tall raceway. The chimps helped people just as often as 18-month-old German toddlers did in a similar setup involving a person struggling to reach a pen.
"The main finding is that human and chimpanzees share altruisic tendencies," Warneken says. In terms of evolution, he adds, this similiarity suggests that the two species' common ancestors had these inclinations before culture developed.
And that tells us something about human nature. "There's a widely held belief that humans are selfish in the beginning and only through socialization do we turn into somewhat altruistic individuals," Warneken says. This work suggests our nature contains the seeds for both types of behavior.
--Marina Krakovsky
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And to think...all this time I thought that consciously chosen, self-sacrificial altruism was an exclusively human or exclusively "personal" characteristic. Oh well. Live and learn.
Get this magazine. This ain't the only cool stuff in there. Seriously.
"For it is said, 'The two will become one flesh.' But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in Spirit.
"For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, 'Abba, Father.' The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children."
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