Robots playing word games!!
Lingodroid Robots Invent Their Own Spoken Language
POSTED BY: Evan Ackerman / Tue, May 17, 2011 at Spectrum IEEE
"To understand the concept behind the project, consider a simplified case of how language might have developed. Let's say that all of a sudden you wake up somewhere with your memory completely wiped, not knowing English, Klingon, or any other language. And then you meet some other person who's in the exact same situation as you. What do you do?
"What might very well end up happening is that you invent some random word to describe where you are right now, and then point at the ground and tell the word to the other person, establishing a connection between this new word and a place. And this is exactly what the Lingodroids do. If one of the robots finds itself in an unfamiliar area, it'll make up a word to describe it, choosing a random combination from a set of syllables. It then communicates that word to other robots that it meets, thereby defining the name of a place.
"From this fundamental base, the robots can play games with each other to reinforce the language. For example, one robot might tell the other robot 'kuzo,' and then both robots will race to where they think 'kuzo' is. When they meet at or close to the same place, that reinforces the connection between a word and a location."
More info and pics at the source. Is anyone else ridiculously happy at the idea of little robots playing word tag with each other?!