An article from Engadget about Sony teaching AIBO, its robotic dog, new tricks at its labs in France. Certainly has a bit of an I Robot tenor to the whole thing, but it is still fascinating that independent units can be taught to learn and teach each other.
A related article, from The Engineer Online, speaks of the technology behind what made the Sony experiments possible -- allowing robots to "evolve their own language, bypassing the limits of imposing human rule-based communication."
An edited excerpt from the article: "The most important aspect is how it learns to communicate and interact. The AIBO dogs start from scratch to develop the language structures and common agreements on words to describe objects. The researchers achieved this through instilling their robots with a sense of ‘curiosity.’
Initially programmed to merely recognise stimuli from their sensors, the AIBOs learnt to distinguish between objects and how to interact with them over the course of several hours or days. The curiosity system, or ‘metabrain,’ continually forced the AIBOs to look for new and more challenging tasks, and to give up on activities that did not appear to lead anywhere. This in turn led them to learn how to perform more complex tasks, an indication of an open-ended learning capability much like that of human children.
Like children, the AIBOs initially started babbling aimlessly until two or more settled on a sound to describe an object or aspect of their environment, gradually building a lexicon and grammatical rules through which to communicate."
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