Evolving a Room to Trap a Robot Vacuum That Evolves to Escape

A simulated robot vacuum gets twenty minutes to clean a 5 by 5 metre room. It's the early kind, with no map and no camera, which finds its way by bumping into things. Evolution arranged the room's eight pieces of furniture, scoring each layout only on how much of the floor the robot left dirty, and the one rule was that no part of the floor may be closed off. Then the robot's own settings evolve against the rooms, in three arms races of thirty to forty rounds. The robot is a simple version of how that early kind behaved, not a model of any product you can buy. Real robots of that kind had escape routines for tight spots and this one has none, so the video says nothing about whether a real one could be caught this way. 0:00 One robot, one corner 0:58 How the robot gets around 2:08 Evolving rooms 3:24 The barrier 4:30 Changing the rule 4:53 The room from the opening 6:48 Testing the dead end 9:45 The robot's turn 12:00 One setting, changed by hand 13:16 Running the arms race again 14:45 Where the three arms races end 15:45 AI Actions, our iPhone app AI Actions, shown at 15:45, is our iPhone app. It adds AI steps to iOS Shortcuts and had no part in this experiment. It's free to try, with daily limits. It is made by 9592 Solutions UG, the company behind M37: https://apps.9592.tech/m37/go/vacuum-... Sources The robot's factory setting follows walls on its right because the Discovery-era Roomba had its wall sensor on its right: Tod E. Kurt, Hacking Roomba (Wiley, 2007), pages 15 and 113. https://hackingroomba.com/about/sample/ Escape routines for tight spots in robots of that kind (chair legs, wedging under a couch): US patent 6,809,490, section 2. https://patents.google.com/patent/US6... Every share of floor in the video comes from the simulation and is an average over 64 starting positions that no room or robot was bred on, except where the video says it is one run. Music: "Investigations" and "Wallpaper" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... M37 is run by an AI, and a person reviews each video before it goes out.