Alice robots at work.

What’s the News: The diminutive, unassuming Alice robot has helped a Swiss research team test a core tenet about the evolution of altruism, called Hamilton’s rule. The researchers’ new study shows that even simple robots operating with simple evolutionary rules can recreate evolution’s complex interplay of selfishness and selflessness.

How the Heck:

Each Alice bot is a trundling cube equipped with two wheels and 33 “genes” that reflect the make-up of its artificial nervous system. These genes control how well they can move around and push small disks that represent food into their nests. Because researchers wanted to do the study on a big scale (500 generations of 1,600 robots each), they actually carried out most of the action in a computer simulation of the robots, where it could be done faster and cheaper. (Previous work showed that the software version of Alice evolution was a good model of the hardware version.)

At the beginning of the simulation, each robot was randomly assigned a value for each of its genes. Then survival of the fittest took over: The robots that couldn’t gather food effectively didn’t have their ...