can robots teach us anything about culture? festival of ideas, 22 may 2011, bristol alan ft winfield...

Can robots teach us anything about Culture?

Festival of Ideas, 22 May 2011, Bristol

Alan FT Winfield http://alanwinfield.blogspot.com/Bristol Robotics Lab http://www.brl.ac.uk/

A Big Question: How do we have Culture?

We are interested in the processes and mechanisms by which culture emerges…

?

by building a working model of cultural evolution…

with robots

artificial culture lab

What is culture anyway?

The way we do things around here

The Memetic theory of cultural evolution

Meme (n) A unit of cultural transmission

Transmitted by social learning and subject to• variation, • selection and• inheritance

Learning by Imitation

We focus on social learning by imitation

The imitation of movement*

*in the Bristol part of the project which I describe in this talk

Project map

Robot movementimitation

(UWE)

Robot soundimitation (Abertay)

Human interpretation

of robot behaviour(Warwick)

Gene-meme co-evolution

(Manchester)

Cultural theory &

interpretation (Leeds Met)

Philosophical and ethical

interpretation (Exeter)

Partner focus:

1: Robot model2: Agent-based model3: Human subject4: Theory

11

23

4 4

This talk

But your robots are nothing like animals or humans!

Meet the robots

skirt

wheels

eye

brain

e-puck

Learning a (square) dance

Teacher robot

Learning a (square) dance

Teacher robot

Learner robot

segment

move turn

1 15 cm 90 deg

2 14 cm 95 deg

3 16 cm 85 deg

4 13 cm 80 deg

Learned action sequence…

Imitation is hard to do

Imitate the last thing you seeAnimation of recorded robot moves:

…and the dance quickly degenerates

Ok, try a different strategy

Robot A

dance moves

1 (seed) 20,45; 20,45; 20,45; 20,45

2 …

3 …

4 …

5 …

Memory

Robot B

Memory

dance moves

1 (seed) 20,45; 20;45; 20,45; 20,45

2 15,15; 10,25; 22;42; 19,40; 18,35

3 …

4 …

5 …

Select which learned dance to enact, at random

Robot A

dance moves

1 (seed) 20,45; 20,45; 20,45; 20,45

2 Copy of B1 or B2

3 …

4 …

5 …

Memory

Robot B

Memory

dance moves

1 (seed) 20,45; 20;45; 20,45; 20,45

2 15,15; 10,25; 22;42; 19,40; 18,35

3 …

4 …

5 …

Open-ended memetic evolution

And we see the emergence of a new meme species

Making sense of it all

A family tree of meme evolution.Solid lines and red memes are high-fidelity copies of parent memes

Have we learned anything about (robot) culture?

Thank you!

• Co-investigators and researchers– Prof Alistair Sutcliffe, Manchester

• Post-doc RA Dr Di Wang

– Prof Frances Griffiths, Warwick• PhD student Sajida Bhamjee

– Dr Jim Bown, Abertay Dundee• PhD student Andy Guest

– Dr Robin Durie, Exeter– Dr Jenny Tennant Jackson, Leeds Met– Prof Alan Winfield, Bristol Robotics Lab (lead)

• PhD students Mehmet Erbas, Paul O’Dowd

http://sites.google.com/site/artcultproject/