Growing Robot Minds

One way to increase the intelligence of a robot might be to train it with a series of missions, analogous to the missions or levels in a video game. In a developmental robot, the training would not be simply learning -- its "brain" structure would actually change. Biological development shows some extremes that a robot could go through, like starting with a small seed that constructs itself, or creating too many neural connections and then in a later phase deleting a whole bunch of them. As another example of development vs. learning, a simple artificial neural network is trained when the weights have been changed after a series of training inputs (and error correction if it is supervised). It would be like growing completely new nodes, network layers, or new networks entirely during each training level.