What happens when we let robots play the game of life? The challenge of studying evolution is that the history of life is buried in the past — we can’t witness the dramatic events that shaped the adaptations we see today. But biorobotics expert John Long has found an ingenious way to overcome this problem: he creates robots that look and behave like extinct animals, subjects them to evolutionary pressures, lets them compete for mates and resources, and mutates their &”genes”;. In short, he lets robots play the game of life.In Darwin’s Devices, Long tells the story of these evolving biorobots — how they came to be, and what they can teach us about the biology of living and extinct species.
