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/