The first “living robots”, also known as xenobots (I told you about it here), created in January 2020, are now capable of something that is essential for the survival of any species: reproduction.
If you missed them, I'll tell you what it is: xenobots are organisms that, in fact, use a whole new form of biological self-replication. Observing this incredible evolution is new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Glthe study authors they discovered that the machines can collect hundreds of individual cells and assemble them into “baby” Xenobots. After a few days, little ones evolve to look and move just like their parents.
The offspring can then repeat the process over and over again.
Such a xenobot father, such a xenobot son
“People have thought for a long time that we had worked out all the ways life can reproduce or replicate,” says the study co-author Douglas Blackiston, senior scientist at Tufts University, in a statement. “But this is something that has never been observed before.”
The millimeter-wide Xenobots are assembled from living cells scraped from frog embryos. Confined to petri dishes, their lives are very different from those of their amphibious ancestors.
“But we are putting them in a new context. Let's give them the chance to reimagine their multicellularity."
This face is not new to me
As it stands, a Xenobot can produce "babies", but the system normally dies shortly thereafter. To give these "new parents" the chance to see "their children" grow up, the researchers turned to an actor who is never missing from storytelling these days. Gentlemen, artificial intelligence. Yes: The team used an evolutionary algorithm to test billions of potential body shapes in the simulation. The system was designed to find modules that would be effective for the self-replication method.
One of his most captivating creations, at least for me who was born in '75 and had my fill of Coin Up as a boy? He looked like Pac-Man. And artificial intelligence was needed, you might say. All you had to do was ask me.
The researchers then built a Xenobot with this form and tested its "child-raising" abilities. They found that the AI-designed parent could use its Pac-Man-shaped “mouth” to squeeze stem cells into circular offspring.
A whole lineage was born: the first children of xenobots built grandchildren, who built great-grandchildren, who built great-great-grandchildren.
Xenobot: what now?
In a very short time, the Xenobots were induced to work in groups, to self-heal and even to record memories, but today they can reproduce: who does not come up with apocalyptic visions of self-replicating robots?
Needless to say, researchers are more optimistic: from this goal, living machines could emerge that clean microplastics from the seas, or "living medicines" that travel on their own to the point where they can work best. When we learn to guide them better, we will be able to make them our army to control and guide groups of cells: traumatic injuries, genetic defects, cancer... aging.
