Robots decide: Apple or poison?
Swiss researchers recently demonstrated robots that artificially evolve ways to communicate with one another. In their experiments, the robots were set loose in an area containing two types of objects – one classified as “food” and another designated “poison.” The “poison” object was marked with a skull and crossbones, a common designation that has existed since the 19th century. But the “food” object was marked with the logo of Apple Inc.
If you watch the video of the robots in action, you’ll see them flash their lights and eventually swarm the Apple “food,” kind of like attendees at Macworld Expo learning about an impending raffle drawing.
Perhaps this is just the beginning of using the Apple logo to designate “food.” Maybe a century from now mall directories and other maps that use bathroom and telephone symbols will use the Apple logo to show you where the food court is located. Or maybe the robots will have taken us over by then.
For more about the evolving robots, read the full story at: Robot swarms ‘evolve’ effective communication
via The Raw Feed
Scott Rose on March 1st, 2007 at 9:53 pm
Wow, if that’s as far as we’ve come with artificial intelligence, color me unimpressed!
mdmunoz on March 2nd, 2007 at 2:06 am
@Scott:
What do you mean?
Apple good. Death bad.
That pretty much sums up my cognitive abilities.
Martin Hauser on March 2nd, 2007 at 2:29 am
Nice, very nice. Guess it’s quite a lot of fun to develop those and having a small bit of past expierience with such things, i guess tracking the lights is not that difficult, still very impressive.
Honza on March 2nd, 2007 at 3:59 am
Hey if you can get paid to do this sort of thing as your day job, don’t knock it! :-)
RjL on March 2nd, 2007 at 7:05 am
They should have used the Vista symbol for the poison.
Honza on March 2nd, 2007 at 7:17 am
LOL
StockTube on March 2nd, 2007 at 8:36 am
i think should use mcdonald logo as food and apple as poison … since so many people have been poisoned by apple ipod and the coming iphone …
cheers …