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The Emergence of Artificial Culture in Robot Societies

机器人社会中人工文化的出现

基本信息

批准号：
EP/E062083/1
负责人：
Alan Winfield
金额：
$ 93.53万
依托单位：
University of the West of England
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2007
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2007 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FE062083%2F1
关键词：
Emergence Artificial Culture Robot Societies

项目摘要

A profound question that transcends disciplinary boundaries is how can culture emerge and evolve as a novel property in groups of social animals? We can narrow that question by focussing our attention on the very early stages of the emergence and evolution of simple cultural artefacts; the transition, as it were, from nothing recognisable as culture, to something (let us call this proto-culture). This project aims to address and illuminate that question in a radical and hitherto inconceivable new way by building an artificial society of embodied intelligent agents (real robots), creating an environment (artificial ecosystem) and appropriate primitive behaviours for those robots, then free running the artificial society. Even with small populations (a few tens) of relatively simple robots we will, in a short time, see a very large number of interactions between robots. The inherent heterogeneities of real robots, and the noise and uncertainty of the real world, vastly increase the space of possibilities and the scope for unexpected emergence in the interactions between robots. In this project we will aim to create the conditions and primitives in which proto-culture can emerge in a robot society. Robots will, for example, be able to copy each other's behaviours and select which behaviours to copy. Behaviours (memes) will mutate because of the noise and uncertainty in the real robots' sensors and actuators, and successful memes will undergo multiple cycles of copying (heredity), selection and variation (mutation). Furthermore we will introduce a bi-phased approach in which we alternate between real-time (with real physical robots) in which the emergence, selection and refinement of these discrete behavioural artefacts takes place; with evolutionary time, in which we run a genetic algorithm (GA) process to grow and evolve the robots' controllers so that the behaviours and premiums associated with the emerging memes become hard-wired into the robots' (neural) controllers. In this way we hope to see the emergence of interesting behavioural artefacts that, we hope, will be qualitatively and quantitatively distinct from those present at the beginning. Of course the behavioural artefacts that emerge and evolve, that we hope to identify as proto-cultural analogues, will not be human but decidedly robotic. We do not expect these artificial memes to have any meaning in a human cultural context; rather, they will be meaningful only within the closed context of this artificial society (an exo-culture). A significant challenge for this project will therefore be to identify and interpret these patterns of behaviour as evidence for an emerging exo-culture; the challenge is hermeneutic - what means will we be able to develop by which we can identify/recognise meaningful/cultural behaviour; and, then, what means might we go on to develop for interpreting/understanding this behaviour and/or its significance?

一个超越学科界限的深刻问题是，文化如何作为一种新特性在社会性动物群体中出现和进化？我们可以通过将注意力集中在简单文化艺术品的出现和演变的早期阶段来缩小这个问题的范围。可以说，从不被认为是文化的东西到某种东西（让我们称之为原始文化）的转变。该项目旨在以一种激进且迄今为止不可想象的新方式解决和阐明这个问题，通过构建一个由具体智能代理（真正的机器人）组成的人工社会，为这些机器人创建一个环境（人工生态系统）和适当的原始行为，然后自由运行该人工社会。即使只有少量（几十个）相对简单的机器人，我们也会在短时间内看到机器人之间大量的交互。真实机器人固有的异质性，以及现实世界的噪音和不确定性，极大地增加了机器人之间交互的可能性空间和意外出现的范围。在这个项目中，我们的目标是创造条件和原语，使原始文化能够在机器人社会中出现。例如，机器人将能够复制彼此的行为并选择要复制的行为。由于真实机器人传感器和执行器中的噪声和不确定性，行为（模因）会发生变异，成功的模因将经历复制（遗传）、选择和变异（突变）的多个循环。此外，我们将引入一种双阶段方法，在这种方法中，我们在实时（使用真实的物理机器人）之间交替，在这些方法中，这些离散行为制品的出现、选择和细化发生；随着进化时间的推移，我们运行遗传算法（GA）过程来成长和进化机器人的控制器，以便与新兴模因相关的行为和奖励硬连接到机器人的（神经）控制器中。通过这种方式，我们希望看到有趣的行为人工制品的出现，我们希望这些人工制品在质量和数量上都与一开始出现的行为有所不同。当然，我们希望将其识别为原始文化类似物的出现和进化的行为制品将不是人类，而是绝对的机器人。我们并不期望这些人造模因在人类文化背景下具有任何意义；相反，它们只有在这个人造社会（外文化）的封闭背景下才有意义。因此，该项目的一个重大挑战是识别和解释这些行为模式，作为新兴外文化的证据；挑战是解释学的——我们将能够开发出什么方法来识别/识别有意义的/文化行为；那么，我们可以继续开发什么方法来解释/理解这种行为和/或其意义？