Jason Striegel wrote an interesting post for Hackaday about a proposed sexual evolution mechanism for robots. He tells Boing Boing:
Using Lego Mindstorms, you can create simple robots that have the ability to mate (swap a simple software genome) and evolve (random chance of single point mutations). Mutations that make a robot unfit for traversing its environment or unable to mate will effectively drive it toward extinction as it cannot pass on its genes.
It's a pretty interesting experiment, as you can watch novel behaviors emerge with each generation. Even more interesting are the possible applications for an evolution based robotic platform. Two things that immediately come to mind are sex-based software upgrade mechanisms for distributed machines and distributed robot cultures that can adapt as a group to be optimized for communication in an environment, rather than being explicitly programmed for the task.
Now, I couldn't find any specific reference to fembots with gun-boobies in Jason's post, but any excuse to post this jpeg's a good one. Link
James P. Howard says:
This is ancient technology. Start with the Wikipedia article on genetic algorithms (Link)
and for an excellent lay introduction, suggest "Artificial Life" by Steven Levy (Amazon Link)
