It fakes to the left; it goes to the right. But the deceiver isn't a running back, and this isn't football. Meet the newest lying robot. Georgia Tech scientists Alan Wagner and Ronald Arkincreated two bots on wheels that play hide and seek with each other. The hider, however, had something the seeker lacked: an algorithm in its programming that allowed it, under certain circumstances, to fib. The prevaricating machine was pretty good at it, too, fooling the naive seeker three-quarters of the time in a simple test. Here's the setup: There are three spaces in which the hider could hide—left, middle, and right. There are also three markers standing in a row, the idea being that the hiding bot would run over the left marker if it decided to hide at left, or the right marker if it decided to hide at right. The seeker bot knows this, and so it would look for the clue of a fallen marker to predict where its target is hiding.
However, unbeknownst to the poor red seeker, the black robot had a trick up its sleeve. Once it had passed the coloured markers, it shifted direction and hid in an entirely different location, leaving behind it a false trail that managed to fool the red robot in 75 percent of the 20 trials that the researchers ran. The five failed trails resulted from the black robots’ difficulty in knocking over the correct markers. [Wired.com]
