Male and female robots

Abstract

A population of male and female robots evolves in an environment in which to remain alive they must eat the food contained in the environment and to reproduce they must mate with a robot of the opposite sex. The only difference between male and female robots is that after mating males can mate again (reproductively) while females have a fixed period during which they are nonreproductive. The results show that males have a greater variance in reproductive success than females; they tend always to be very active looking for the ‘‘scarce resource’’ constituted by reproductive females and eating any food they are able to find while they are looking for reproductive females. Reproductive females are less active than males and they adopt the reproductive strategy of waiting for males to find and mate with them. In contrast, nonreproductive females are as active as males, but they only look for food and are not interested in anything else. We also find a number of differences between males and females in their preferences for different types of food, and in offspring care if males do not have parental certainty.