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" Telling a robot to build a better robot seems like the beginning of any number of terrifying dystopian stories in science\u00A0fiction. But this seems innocuous enough. A team led by University of Cambridge researchers designed a robot &amp;quot;mother&amp;quot; to design,\u00A0create, and test robot &amp;quot;children.&amp;quot; The mother can take a look at the results of its children and design future generations to incorporate certain traits over others. That&amp;#039;s without any signal from a human to pick one or the other. In short, robotic evolution.        The experiment specifically tasked the mother with building ten children out of plastic cubes with a small motor inside so that it could move. Each child could be composed of between one and five total plastic cubes, and the mother ultimately judged them based on how far they moved from their start point during a set amount of time. The ones that moved the furthest remained unchanged for the next generation, but the mother went back to the drawing board for the rest. In the end, over five separate experiments, the team found that the average speed of the fastest kid in the final generation moved more than twice as fast as the average speed of the fastest kid in the first. In some ways, the experiment is replicating with robots what coders have been doing for years, using evolutionary algorithms to solve for certain problems or aim towards set results. You can see a (very) basic example of evolutionary algorithms at work in this\u00A0program that creates random\u00A0&amp;quot;cars&amp;quot; and evolves them based on which car can drive the furthest. Now, excuse me while I go watch\u00A0Fast, Cheap &amp;amp;amp; Out of Control.. Source: University of Cambridge via Motherboard "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a16878/robot-builds-robots/>