Photo credit: Douglas Blackiston and Sam Kriegman
Scientists from Harvard University, University of Vermont, and Tufts University have created the world’s first AI-designed Xenobots that can replicate. Though it sounds as creepy as this robotic finger with human-like skin, these living robots are essentially computer-designed, hand-assembled organisms capable of swimming out into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble “baby” Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped “mouth”.
After assembling baby Xenobots, these then go out, find cells, and build copies of themselves. Some may find self-replicating biotechnology a nightmare waiting to happen, but for this team of scientists, the goal is deeper understanding and advancements toward regenerative medicine. These living robots could one day be used to predict and control what groups of cells are going to build.
We asked the supercomputer at UVM to figure out how to adjust the shape of the initial parents, and the AI came up with some strange designs after months of chugging away, including one that resembled Pac-Man. It’s very non-intuitive. It looks very simple, but it’s not something a human engineer would come up with. Why one tiny mouth? Why not five? We sent the results to Doug and he built these Pac-Man-shaped parent Xenobots. Then those parents built children, who built grandchildren, who built great-grandchildren, who built great-great-grandchildren,” said Sam Kriegman, Ph.D., the lead author on the new study.
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