According to the latest findings published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, computer algorithms have been generated that can evolve an organism made of frog DNA. Even though the original stem cells have been derived from the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, the ‘xenobots‘ don’t resemble any known amphibians. Skin cells held these bots together. The beating of heart tissues in specific parts of their “bodies” propelled them through water in a petri dish for weeks, without needing additional nutrients.
Crux of the Matter
These autonomous agents measure only 0.04 inches (1 mm) wide and are made of living tissue that biologists assembled into bodies designed by computer models.
Just as evolution works in the natural world, the least successful forms would be deleted by the computer program. These designs were brought to life by joining the stem cells together to form self-powered 3D shapes designed by the evolution algorithm.
Biologists reported that these mobile organisms were able to move independently and collectively, self-heal wounds and survive for weeks at a time, potentially to transport medicines inside a patient’s body.
Study co-author Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont, said in a statement. “They’re neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It’s a new class of artefact: a living, programmable organism.”
These xenobots are expected to be used for targeting toxic spills or radioactive contamination, collecting marine microplastics and even excavating plaque from human arteries.
Curiopedia
Artificial Intelligence or AI is the intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans. Leading AI textbooks define the field as the study of “intelligent agents”: any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals. Colloquially, the term is often used to describe machines (or computers) that mimic “cognitive” functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as “learning” and “problem-solving”. As machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered to require “intelligence” are often removed from the definition of AI, a phenomenon known as the AI effect. Modern machine capabilities generally classified as AI include successfully understanding human speech, competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go), autonomously operating cars, intelligent routing in content delivery networks and military simulations. More Info
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