Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
mk · 4952 days ago · link · · parent · post: A Quantitative Test of Hamilton's Rule for the Evolution of Altruism
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.
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...
–
–
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 ;)