Technology

In a Swiss laboratory, a group of ten robots is competing for food. Prowling around a small arena, the machines are part of an innovative study looking at the evolution of communication, from engineers Sara Mitri and Dario Floreano and evolutionary biologist Laurent Keller.

They programmed robots with the task of finding a "food source" indicated by a light-coloured ring at one end of the arena, which they could "see" at close range with downward-facing sensors. The other end of the arena, labelled with a darker ring was "poisoned". The bots get points based on how much time they spend near food or poison, which indicates how successful they are at their artificial lives.

They can also talk to one another. Each can produce a blue light that others can detect with cameras and that can give away the position of the food because of the flashing robots congregating nearby. In short, the blue light carries information, and after a few generations, the robots quickly evolved the ability to conceal that information and deceive one another.

Their evolution was made possible because each one was powered by an artificial neural network controlled by a binary "genome". The network consisted of 11 neurons that were connected to the robot's sensors and 3 that controlled its two tracks and its blue light. The neurons were linked via 33 connections - synpases - and the strength of these connections was each controlled by a single 8-bit gene. In total, each robot's 264-bit genome determines how it reacts to information gleaned from its senses.

In the experiment, each round consisted of 100 groups of 10 robots, each competing for food in a separate arena. The 200 robots with the highest scores - the fittest of the population - "survived" to the next round. Their 33 genes were randomly mutated (with a 1 in 100 chance that any bit with change) and the robots were "mated" with each other to shuffle their genomes. The result was a new generation of robots, whose behaviour was inherited from the most successful representatives of the previous cohort....

With the yoke of natural selection relaxed, processes like genetic drift - where genes pick up changes randomly - were free to produce more genetic diversity and more varied behaviour. After around 500 generations of evolution, around 60% of the robots never emitted light near food, but around 10% of them did so most of the time. Some robots were slightly attracted to the blue light, but a third were strongly drawn to it and another third were actually repulsed.

Mitri, Floreano and Keller think that similar processes are at work in nature. When animals move, forage or generally go about their lives, they provide inadvertent cues that can signal information to other individuals. If that creates a conflict of interest, natural selection will favour individuals that can suppress or tweak that information, be it through stealth, camouflage, jamming or flat-out lies. As in the robot experiment, these processes could help to explain the huge variety of deceptive strategies in the natural world.

A new technology is allowing researchers in Australia to use five dimensions to encode DVD signals on disc. In addition to the three 'normal' dimensions, they were able to use polarization and color (wavelengths of light) to store two extra dimensions worth of data in the same physical space. Absolutely fascinating and something I'd not considered possible before now.

Discs currently have three spatial dimensions. By using gold nanorods Gu and colleagues were able to add two additional dimensions, one based on the colour spectrum, and the other on polarisation.

Because nanoparticles react to light depending on their shape, it was possible to record information in a range of different colour's wavelengths at the same physical location on the disc.

Current DVDs record in a single colour wavelength using a laser.

The fifth dimension was made possible by polarisation. When light waves were projected onto the disc, the direction of the electric field within the waves aligned with the gold nanorods.

"The polarisation can be rotated 360 degrees," explained co-author James Chon.

One of my favorite movies is Fifth Element, a quirky sci-fi with loads of eye candy (Milla Jovovich included) and abstract technologies to explore. One scene that jumped out at me as not-so-far-fetched the first time I watched it was where one of Zorg's agents uses a cockroach to infiltrate and spy on a discussion with the President. The cockroach was controlled by remote-control, and featured a bug-like (no pun) listening device, allowing transmission of the conversation.

Not-so-far-fetched was right, as it turns out, with a story in Discover Magazine (The Pentagon’s Beetle Borgs) about a Pentagon-backed research project conducted at UC-Berkeley.

The first wireless flying-insect cyborg—a remote-controlled beetle—has been developed by engineers at the University of California at Berkeley. The six-legged biomechanical hybrid can rise, hover, and fly on command, guided by a radio receiver that relays signals to electrodes connected to the insect’s optic lobes and flight muscles.

This really feels like a no-brainer to me. Not only are there all sorts of ways to replace humans in risky situations (exploring deep caves or toxic environments), but you could also reduce expenditures for other tecnological-dependent actions (military drones, for example).

Of course, this new technology opens up numerous ethical considerations for which there are really no foreseeable consensus. Not that this crosses any boundaries we haven't long ago chosen to cross, but new combinations of technology and animals always brings the ethical questions to the forefront.

I personally think this is a natural evolution of our ability to effect and direct our environment. Consider the fluke and ant story that Dan Dennett likes to use and you'll recognize that we aren't even the first species to manipulate other species in this manner.

The last repaired dipole magnet in the Large Hadron Collider has finally been placed, a big step in getting this enormously important machine back online for its scheduled fall relaunch.

The usual running pattern at CERN is to start in the spring, and collide beams through the late fall, and do machine maintenance, etc. during the winter when electric power is more expensive in Europe (they heat with nukes, basically; we burn fossil fuel in the US in winter).

But a decision was reached earlier this year to run the LHC through next winter, with only a brief two-week shutdown for Christmas and New Year.

What we can reasonably expect is that if all goes well, we can accumulate something like 100 inverse picobarns of collisions by spring 2010, and perhaps 200 pb-1 by the end of the run in fall, 2010. Now, pb-1 this is a strange unit - it has dimensions of inverse area. Formally we call it integrated luminosity. Basically it tells you how many collisions you’ve had, in essence. To get the number of some type of interesting events, you need to know the cross section - which has units of area - for producing that type of event. Then you simply multiply the cross section times the integrated luminosity.