So an article was published yesterday in a few journals profiling recent findings by Australian researchers that have developed lingodroids — robots designed to explore, map out, and name places in their environment. The mobile robots were equipped with surveillance apparel (camera, laser, sonar), a syllabary, and technology that enables them 'speak' their invented words to each other. What the researchers found is that they took to socializing — sharing their made-up words and confirming their linguistic agreement by playing several hundred games to demonstrate their mutual understanding. Amazing as this all is, I do think the suggestion that the robots have invented a language is questionable; a better description is that they are developing a lexicon. Whether that grows into a language with verbs (expressing descriptions of time, which is more than just nominal descriptions of space) is another question. If so, just wait until they develop syntax and inflection. Despite the hype about the language, though, the "spoken words" documented in this study do seem like a byproduct of the robots' spatial calculations, facilitated by the technology that enables them to make sound, and then reinforced by trial and error identification. What is really cool about this experiment, though, is that the robots invented names (and several of them) for places that they couldn’t explore. For some reason, the article includes this as parenthetical information, but it seems to me that that is mindblowingly sophisticated. The robots' capacity to create and corroborate identities for locations other than where they are physically situated — mapping the elsewhere, so to speak — suggests that they have some 'awareness' not only of each other, but of each other's abilities to detect the world beyond their immediate physical environment.
