Cooperative Robots

Here is a video that purports to show research that has developed cooperative robots:



I'm not disagreeing that the robots cooperate or that they have used genetic algorithms to evolve or neural networks to express their behaviour. My complaint is that this research is "oversold". The result isn't as profound, ground-breaking, or deep as the video would imply. This is just another research group doing a little bit that essentially confirms what others have done. I see nothing earth-shaking in this research.

Sadly research groups have to compete for money. So the funding institutes have set up a "learning environment" which encourages researchers to "oversell" their research and do too much "me-too" research. Pressures for research funding are setting up their own "evolution" which is perverting research into optimizing the selling of research and not necessarily optimizing the efficient discovery of new science.