So if you’re going to make a xenobot, where do you start? Well, the Vermont team starts in a virtual Petri dish, on a computer, where an artificial intelligence (AI) program ‘evolves’ bunches of frog cells, based on their shape, to perform whatever task it is the scientists are interested in.
“It creates a population of virtual xenobots, deletes the ones that do a poor job and makes randomly modified copies of the survivors,” explains Bongard.
The scientists tell the AI how many rounds of this artificial selection process to complete and in just a few seconds, they have their design.
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