tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1973938108988281018.post3675750788643799370..comments2024-02-06T03:23:37.329-08:00Comments on No Jesus, No Peas: Robots evolve to deceive -- how could they evolve to cooperate?James Sweethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17212877636980569324noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1973938108988281018.post-60206888297964636512009-08-18T10:48:24.847-07:002009-08-18T10:48:24.847-07:00heh, well, after my last comment I went and revisi...heh, well, after my last comment I went and revisited some of this stuff on Wikipedia and I think I've been seriously abusing the terminology here anyway. "Bayesian network" apparently means something way more specific than I thought it did... So perhaps we are both equally clueless :)James Sweethttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17212877636980569324noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1973938108988281018.post-48874703167397776522009-08-18T10:37:11.533-07:002009-08-18T10:37:11.533-07:00I don't know a thing about Bayesian networks, ...I don't know a thing about Bayesian networks, and didn't read the original article, so my mental picture was just little tiny R2D2-like "mice" running around with multiple generations existing at once and all of them looking for "cheese" or batteries or electric outlets or whatever. Hah! Here comes the cat!Margarethttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16199879535909581777noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1973938108988281018.post-80319795564070909362009-08-18T10:27:33.948-07:002009-08-18T10:27:33.948-07:00If one of the inputs to the Bayesian network was &...If one of the inputs to the Bayesian network was "time organism has been alive" then I suppose you could theoretically evolve metamorphic units, rather than having to impose some sort of hackneyed external rule, like the gradual shrinking phenotypic drift I proposed earlier. Still, though, this is not quite the same thing as a child growing into an adult, I don't think... while some of the traits that differ between immature and mature organisms are surely an intentional genetic result, I imagine a number of them are also due to the practical physical concerns of building an adult organism out of biological building blocks, with limited resources. <br /><br />I don't see any simple way to model that in a Bayesian network. If there were some way to classify certain coefficient values as "energy intensive", then we could imagine setting up the model so that organisms cannot manifest the energy intensive coefficients in their genes until after a certain amount of time/consuming a certain amount of "food". But how would you determine the coefficient values were "energy intensive"? Hmmm...James Sweethttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17212877636980569324noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1973938108988281018.post-82627674037749542532009-08-18T10:21:51.577-07:002009-08-18T10:21:51.577-07:00So now this opens a whole other can of worms... (o...So now this opens a whole other can of worms... (or can of robots?) In the original experimental setup, as I understand it, there is a discrete transition from generation to generation, i.e. you don't have units from generation N coexisting with units from generation N+1. I kept thinking the selective benefit of a partially altruistic population might be more powerful if the generations bled into one another, because now there is an added benefit to "cooperative carriers" in that they are <i>directly</i> likely to be surrounded by more "cooperatives" later in life. That could be intensified still more if reproduction was geographically proximal, i.e. when a new unit is produced, its initial location is in the same area as the parent(s).<br /><br />I hadn't even thought about what would happen if the robots progressed over time... Actually, I'm not sure anybody has done this with genetic simulations, since it's not obvious how to combine it with traditional Bayesian networks. I suppose one possibility would be to have a unit's "phenotype", in terms of the coefficients used in the Bayesian network, start out with a random drift of a pre-programmed magnitude, i.e. you start out with all of the Bayesian coefficients randomly distributed within +/-10% of what the "genome" specifies, and then the coefficients converge on the genome as the unit "ages".<br /><br />Of course that's not the same as normal animal development (or plant development, for that matter) but I wonder if it would be a useful model.<br /><br />Man, I steered away from neural networks in grad school because I thought (and still think, to be honest) that they aren't a whole lot more than a computational novelty. Maybe useful in very specific circumstances, but generally speaking it seems to me much more logical to just develop an algorithm yourself to do what you want, rather than "train" a Bayesian network to do it. (Genetic algorithms clearly have computational value, but genetic algorithms do not need to be based on neural networks, and in fact often aren't) But now I'm thinking maybe I should have gotten into it more. Ah well...James Sweethttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17212877636980569324noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1973938108988281018.post-65174433994289193332009-08-18T10:08:26.314-07:002009-08-18T10:08:26.314-07:00If the next generation was weak and numerous, so t...If the next generation was weak and numerous, so that most died of starvation before becoming fully functional adults able to forage successfully, wouldn't that increase the generational benefit of a "gene" for the "altruistic" behavior of feeding offspring? If that could happen, I'd think that it should spread through the gene pool fairly quickly. Once parent-child (one or both parents) "altruism" became the norm, it might be easier to get a mutation for cooperation between the parents to feed their offspring, or even for the object of the altruism to accidentally extend from the child to others "close" to it. Mutual "altruism" would be the same as "cooperation." IANAbiologist, but that seems a more reasonable path to cooperation than just trying to get independent adults to cooperate from scratch. Or maybe that could help fill in your "somehow or other."Margarethttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16199879535909581777noreply@blogger.com