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/