Robots evolve altruism | Hacker News Reader

Robots evolve altruism

news.sciencemag.org

22 pointsww52015 comments

"From Charles Darwin on, evolutionary biologists have struggled to explain self-sacrificing behavior."

I had trouble reading beyond that line, since it's simply false. A quick reading of "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins would correct that impression.

Or for that matter, a reading of Darwin. Altruism really isn't that hard to explain in an evolutionary context.

It's not false at all. Origin of Species was published in 1859. The Selfish Gene was published in 1976. So even if everyone immediately accepted Dawkins' synthesis upon reading it (which they didn't), that sentence is still an accurate history of biologists' opinions over the years.

It if were past tense ("From Charles Darwin on, evolutionary biologists struggled"), that would be fair, but the sentence reads as present tense ("From Charles Darwin on, evolutionary biologists have struggled"). As worded, the sentence implies that biologists as a whole are still struggling to explain it, that it's some mystery the field has yet to grasp.

Imagine if a sentence in a news story read, "For centuries, doctors have struggled to determine whether diseases are caused by an imbalance of the body's humours or by germs and genetics."

Would you defend that by saying, "It's not false at all. Germ theory didn't gain much currency until the mid-1800s, and we didn't understand genetics until a century later. So even if everyone immediately accepted germ theory upon reading it (which they didn't), that sentence is still an accurate history of doctors' opinions over the years"?

Slight nitpick: The sentence is in present perfect not in present tense.

I actually did know that, but it wouldn't mean anything to most people, and the actual time frame attached to the present perfect tense depends a lot on context. If you say, "I have done things I'm not proud of," that implies a vastly different time period than "I have hated him since he walked out on me." So I thought it was simplest just to point out that it was not the past tense and that it reads most naturally as something that has been true up to the present.

How does he explain helping unrelated strangers?

I don't know off the top of my head. However, I can think of two very simple reasons pretty quickly.

Reason #1: future favors, tit-for-tat types of responses. If I help a friend out in a time of need, some day when I am in need the same friend might be able to help me. Neither of us are related, but we've both increased our survivability. This effect becomes more prominent with communities, even communities of unrelated individuals: you all survive or die as a group.

Reason #2: a fluke of the system. Evolution doesn't provide perfect solutions, just "good enough" solutions (evolution is dumb). Thus a species that is very good at being altruistic for close relatives (a beneficial thing), but occasionally is altruistic for unrelated strangers (possibly not beneficial) might be, on the whole, better than one that is never altruistic.

Those both make sense. Reason #3 could be "showing off". In the real world, when men perform impressive feats to help others often the real reason is to impress women.

This runs all the way from courageous knights errant to spotty teenagers feigning an interest in Habitat for Humanity.

I think I would rewrite the headline as "Scientist recreate altruism when looking for it."

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?

Accurately 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.

They 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.

Indeed, 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.

Feeling a synthetic kind of love,

Dreaming a sympathetic wish,

As the lights blink faster and brighter...

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