The giant alien robots in Michael Bay's Transformers franchise aren't built in factories. They're grown in egglike pods and referred to as hatchlings, and they exhibit the kind of physical and behavioral diversity that implies something closer to biological reproduction than mass assembly. Just as no two humans are identical (with the exception of twins), each Autobot and Decepticon is unique in character and form, whether it's a humorless tractor-trailer or a hot-tempered Tyrannosaur. The Transformers, in other words, seem to be products of evolutionary robotics, a burgeoning field of research that applies biological principles to the creation and behavior of robots. Rather than simply engineering a bot to perform a given task, such as moving toward a light, researchers can plug that goal into a computer program and let genetic algorithms automatically breed a variety of designs. And since those algorithms mimic nature, modeling the effects of mutation, selection, and other biological processes, the designs they produce are often surprising.
展开▼
