Evolving Robots Learn To Lie To Each Other

08-19-2009 • Popular Science

With the development of killer drones, it seems like everyone is worrying about killer robots. Now, as if that wasn't bad enough, we need to start worrying about lying, cheating robots as well. In an experiment run at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, France, robots that were designed to cooperate in searching out a beneficial resource and avoiding a poisonous one learned to lie to each other in an attempt to hoard the resource. Picture a robo-Treasure of the Sierra Madre.