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ARTIFICIAL intelligence developed by researchers has created its first robot from scratch.
A team at Northwestern University has created an AI that is able to design a robot on its own.


The goal of the AI was to create a robot that could walk on a flat surface.
The program used to create the AI was run on a small personal computer, which was an incredible feat since most AI needs large computers and an accessive amount of power to run.
“We discovered a very fast AI-driven design algorithm that bypasses the traffic jams of evolution, without falling back on the bias of human designers,” Sam Kriegman told Northwestern Now.
“We told the AI that we wanted a robot that could walk across land. Then we simply pressed a button and presto! It generated a blueprint for a robot in the blink of an eye that looks nothing like any animal that has ever walked the earth. I call this process ‘instant evolution.’”
The AI created a block that had the capability of being able to jiggle but not walk.
Once the AI realized its error, it began to modify its design multiple times in order to create a structure that could walk.
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With trial and error, the robot went from bouncing in place to eventually being able to walk after nine tries.
The development of this robot remarkably only took 26 seconds on the laptop.
“Now anyone can watch evolution in action as AI generates better and better robot bodies in real-time,” Kriegman said.
Kriegman believes the development of this robot has happened faster than previous researchers have thought possible.
“Evolving robots previously required weeks of trial and error on a supercomputer, and of course, before any animals could run, swim or fly around our world, there were billions upon billions of years of trial and error,”
“This is because evolution has no foresight. It cannot see into the future to know if a specific mutation will be beneficial or catastrophic. We found a way to remove this blindfold, thereby compressing billions of years of evolution into an instant.”
Without any prompting, the AI came up with a design that had three legs, fins, a flat face, and multiple holes in order to create the walking machinery.
“When humans design robots, we tend to design them to look like familiar objects,” Kriegman said.
“But AI can create new possibilities and new paths forward that humans have never even considered. It could help us think and dream differently. And this might help us solve some of the most difficult problems we face.”