Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Tuesday, 10 July 2018

Emergent abilities in virtual animals thanks to evolution

Fascinating article on virtual animals evolving new abilities by using relations between their existing aspects, via Edward Morbius.

But after thousands of generations, some of the animats evolved the ability to pick up the clues. Their brain evolved a wiring allow it to store the information they picked up in each doorway and use it guide their movements till they got to the next doorway–whereupon they kicked out the old information and recorded the information in the new doorway. Once the animats evolved this simple memory, their performance skyrocketed.

Both animats don’t even use three of the four parts of their brain–that’s why only the circle marked nine is shown in the diagrams. Each one has evolved different patterns of inputs and outputs. It’s hard to break apart the systems into individual circuits and say that they do anything in particular. The behaviour of the animat emerges from the whole network.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2013/08/02/meet-the-animats/

2 comments:

  1. Dan Eastwood A crude analogue of neuronal function and their ability to form and reform (plasticity) networks - but, as you said - "really cool".

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