http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/3924348001?isVid=1&publisherID=1274168784

Some scientists at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne have built “evolving” predator and prey robots designed to, in short, learn from each other. Read that again: While we’re worried about Taylor Swift and and Lady Gaga, robots are now teaching each other how to hunt us.

The robots use Darwinian Selection to decide how to escape each other or work together to catch another robot.

Just a few hundred generations of selection are sufficient to allow robots to evolve collision-free movement, homing, sophisticated predator versus prey strategies, coadaptation of brains and bodies, cooperation, and even altruism. In all cases this occurred via selection in robots controlled by a simple neural network, which mutated randomly.

Presumably they kept running these programs over and over again and eventually produced Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, two Darwinian superrobobeasts designed to lull us into submission.

via Eng