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This is a bizarre sort of study. What can you do with robots that you can't do much more cheaply inside a simulation, apart from eat up a whole bunch of researc
by hugh3 16y ago
This is a bizarre sort of study. What can you do with robots that you can't do much more cheaply inside a simulation, apart from eat up a whole bunch of research funding with an excuse to build tiny little robots?
- qF 16y agoAccurately simulating physics is quite difficult. Simulations are a simplified representation of reality, but translating a simulation back to actual little robots might not work. This is because of noise you would encounter in the real world that is hard to simulate. So there actually are benefits to using robots instead of doing a simulation. Simulations are usually faster and cheaper to create but robots give a more realistic result.
- klochner 16y agoThey did use a simulation. They only built the robots to use as a guide in creating the simulation: The researchers then created virtual representations of these robots on a computer so that they could observe the robots' evolution over time.
- jonnycat 16y agoIndeed, these kinds of altruistic behaviors have been demonstrated many times and in many different ways in simulation. It is interesting to see this implemented with real robots, but it is not at all surprising that the same dynamics would appear.