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Not entirely clear to me why the physical "robots" were used. I would think a simulated agent system e.g. http://repast.sourceforge.net/ would be able to effectively model 'foraging' and 'cost of altruism', etc. Any ideas?
Off topic, but this gave me an idea. Tabletop wargames like warhammer are popular: http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/ I think tabletop robot wars would be really fun. You could program in your strategy and assign roles to your troops, then let them battle. Wow that would be fun to watch.
Probably because they spent a lot of time and grant money building those robots. :) But, seriously, I think you are right, there doesn't seem to be any advantage conferred by the robots in terms of modeling purposes. If anything, there are more limitations. That said, I the effect of physical entities competing on familiar time scales might make the concepts of the study more accessible, and probably a lot more fun to watch. Personally, I was disappointed that they didn't include a video.
They do make this statement: "More generally, this study reveals that a fundamental principle of natural selection also applies to synthetic organisms when these have heritable properties", which might have been in response to a similar query from a reviewer. It reminded me of this great experiment by Robert Axelrod: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/research/Axelrod%20and%20... I heard him discuss it on the radio just a couple of weeks ago.
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I posted the original source as it was far more detailed.
Here is your video :) http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-robots-validating-hamilt...
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The more I think about this, the more annoyed I get. For example, how do they pass genes? IFF they needed to model a physical phenomena (such as fluid dynamics) that would be in effect 'free' with a physical model but soak their cpus, then fine, use physical objects. But for those toy thingies? Frankly, makes you question other aspects of their approach ..
(btw: got a good chuckle seeing c++ and mySql on the bookshelf ;)