Linux is powered by rat brains.

there exist several retail and open source simulation environments for robot populations that can even model things like camera/sensor noise and physics (i.e. collision detection). there are even ways to simulate interference on communications links (radio, optical, etc).

of course, nothing beats using some of your grant money to buy some swarm bots and watch the cute little guys eke out their meager existence, not to mention it looks good in front of the grant committee.

Rat brains? where did you get that from? There’s no mention of rat brains any where in this article or any of the previous articles. It mentions Linux in the earlier swarm bot articles, nothing about rat brains. Checkout http://www.swarm-bots.org/ if you don’t believe me.

Altruism does favor the individual though. It can create an system of reciprocity. If the robots(or anything really with a ’social’ function) was able to inform one or more of the group it existed within of the presence of food/resources then this behavior would be reciprocated to it at some point. By working as a group searching for and sharing food the group increases its efficiency. This idea goes even further to form the basis of human rights. Wikipedia has a decent article on the ethic of reciprocity if you want to look.

The system presented with the robots is perhaps too simple to show this.

Altruism is a characteristic that does not favor the individual. so how is it that altruistic characteristics are found in man when there is no advantage to their long term survival?

These robots are connected to rat brains. There are light rings on the floor, and if a robot is near one, the bot triggers the pleasure and food sensors in the brain making that a good spot to be. And of course various senors are hooked on the brain to do this. This is a merging of robotics and animal. AKA bioengineering.

This of course you can’t make a software program do. One could argue that they should have just simulated this by have the brains control a virtual character… but the purpose is also proof of concept…

You could argue that a complex enough software model would display the same behaviors, but little things like whether or not a bot is quite close enough to another bot to see a signal light varies slightly from robot to robot, which introduces a little bit of variation and randomness (realistic factors) to the study, and different and/or more complex behaviors can emerge from things like that.