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DECEITFUL BEHAVIOR. “After 500 generations, 60 percent of the robots had evolved to keep their light off when they found the good resource, hogging it all for themselves. Even more telling, a third of the robots evolved to actually look for the liars by developing an aversion to the light; the exact opposite of their original programming!" http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-08/evolving-robots-learn-lie-hide-resources-each-other View in LinkedIn

THREE MODULES. "There appear to be three different modules within intrinsically disordered regions responsible for their functionally promiscuous behaviour: MoRFs (molecular recognition features), SLiMs (small linear motifs) and LCRs (low complexity regions)." http://www.biochemj.org/content/454/3/361?sa=X&ved=0CDkQ9QEwEWoVChMIzdjAo5n2xgIVovRyCh0HSAum View in LinkedIn

DESIGN FOR LYING TEST. "The experiment involved 1,000 robots divided into 10 different groups. Each robot had a sensor, a blue light, and its own 264-bit binary code "genome" that governed how it reacted to different stimuli. The first generation robots were programmed to turn the light on when they found the good resource, helping the other robots in the group find it." https://lnkd.in/g_45Y2T View in LinkedIn

CONFORMATIONALLY LOOSE. "Intrinsically disordered segments lack a unique three-dimensional structure, either entirely or in parts, when expressed as autonomous units, and it is assumed that they sample a variety of conformations that are in equilibrium under physiological conditions." http://www.biochemj.org/content/454/3/361?sa=X&ved=0CDkQ9QEwEWoVChMIzdjAo5n2xgIVovRyCh0HSAum View in LinkedIn

EVOLVING ROBOTS LEARN TO LIE. "In an experiment run at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale of Lausanne, Switzerland, robots that were designed to cooperate in searching out a beneficial resource and avoiding a poisonous one learned to lie to each other in an attempt to hoard the resource." https://lnkd.in/g_45Y2T View in LinkedIn

AMBIENT FACTORS. "Recreating the circuit on another identical system makes it fail, so apparently it relies on quirks and imperfections in the transistors to function. No human would ever design a circuit this way." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

UNEXPECTED RESULT. "A computer is programmed to build random circuits and run tests on them to complete a certain task. The best performing circuits are randomly combined into hybrids and tested again. After hundreds of generations the evolved circuit performs the task really well. The researchers thought this would provide insight on more efficient circuit design, but the circuit that evolved was so bizarre they couldn't even understand how it was doing the task." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

MESSY CREATIVITY. "About a 100 million repetitions of this game later, the software came up with a wiring pattern that would create a circuit board (computer chip) that was really pretty good. The layout made no sense to humans just looking at it, because neat & tidy aren't important to the program - like the filing system of a messy bureaucrat with no local supervisor." https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3d3vct View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this meditation on the development of innovation from disordered regions of proteins. The key is promiscuous binding, creating binding hubs which can multiply enormously when connected, as the drawing shows. But with disorder comes also the price of verging towards chaos, the unwanted protein pairings that lead to diseases. https://lnkd.in/dijcJxP View in LinkedIn

DISEASE ASSOCIATIONS. "Proteins with long intrinsically disordered segments have been associated with several human disease conditions. For instance, overexpression of the intrinsically disordered Stathmin has been linked to cancer, whereas the overexpression of tau, ataxin-1, α-synuclein and huntingtin is associated with various neurodegenerative disorders." http://www.biochemj.org/content/454/3/361?sa=X&ved=0CDkQ9QEwEWoVChMIzdjAo5n2xgIVovRyCh0HSAum View in LinkedIn