Gradually we’re creeping up as a species to previously unimagined heights. The next big barrier for the human race to surmount is that of productive artificial intelligence (A.I)

AI is pretty much present in most of our future apocalyptic movies, maybe we’re se they’ll probably cause our demise one day in this real world.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have published a paper demonstrating a robot that is able to build little robots, and then through a process very much identical to natural selection, improve upon them as the generations go by.

The mother robot designed little robot babies that had a small motor inside and was capable of movement. Then the design for the next generation of mini robots was based on the best performing one from the first sequence. So mimicking the process of evolution by natural selection in the natural world, the little robots from each subsequent generation was an improvement on the previous one, until ten generations was exhausted.

What researchers found was that by building on the most desirable traits of the fittest and eliminating the worst ones, the tenth generation robots performed their assigned tasks twice as fast as the first generation.

“Natural selection is basically reproduction, assessment, reproduction, assessment and so on,” said lead researcher Dr Fumiya Iida of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who worked in collaboration with researchers at ETH Zurich.

“That’s essentially what this robot is doing – we can actually watch the improvement and diversification of the species.”

Baby steps (pun intended), but from here we can be looking at more exceptional applications as time goes on. Also, this should demonstrate nicely to those who like denying evolution how it works in an easy to understand way.

Watch a half a minute preview clip below…