Synthetic Ethology An Approach to the Study of Communication

A complete understanding of communication language intention ality and related mental phenomena will require a theory integrating mechanistic explanations with ethological phenomena For the foresee able future the complexities of natural life in its natural environment will preclude such an understanding An approach more conducive to carefully controlled experiments and to the discovery of deep laws of great generality is to study synthetic life forms in a synthetic world to which they have become coupled through evolution This is the approach of synthetic ethology Some simple synthetic ethology ex periments are described in which we have observed the evolution of communication in a population of simple machines We show that Arti cial Life II The Second Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity proceedings Vol X edited by Christopher G Langton Charles Taylor J Doyne Farmer and Steen Rasmussen Redwood City CA Addison Wesley pp even in these simple worlds we nd some of the richness and complex ity found in natural communication I am an old bird a Simorg an all knowing Bird of Ages DeMorgan Budget of Paradoxes p