Scientists at UVM, Tufts create 'living robots' - The Boston Globe

Scientists at the University of Vermont and Tufts University used a supercomputer to evolve a design for tiny living robots made out of frog cells, then assembled them. The tiny new creatures did what they were supposed to do --make their way across a Petri dish. They also had some surprises for the researchers. "These are novel living machines," Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research, said in a statement. "They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. The research results were published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The first author was UVM doctoral student Sam Kriegman. The new "biobots" were designed on the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at UVM's Vermont Advanced Computing Core. Bongard said that in 100 runs, the supercomputer considered billions of designs, looking for a design for a creature that would travel across the bottom of a Petri dish as quickly as possible. "The design we built wasn't imagined by a human.