Colour is an important factor in food detection and acquisition by animals using visually based foraging. Colour can be used to identify the suitability of a food source or improve the efficiency of food detection, and can even be linked to mate choice. Food colour preferences are known to exist, but whether these preferences are heritable and how these preferences evolve is unknown. Using the ...

Recent work with microbial communities has demonstrated an adaptive response to artificial selection at the level of the ecosystem. The reasons for this response and the level at which adaptation occurs are unclear: does selection act implicitly on traits of individual species, or are higher-level traits genuinely being selected? If the ecosystem response is just the additive combination of the...

We apply the optimization algorithm Adaptive Simulated Annealing (ASA) to the problem of analyzing data on a large population and selecting the best model to predict the probability that an individual with various traits will have a particular disease. We compare ASA with traditional forward and backward regression on computer simulated data. We find that the traditional methods of modeling are...

The process of strong artificial selection during a domestication event is modeled, and its effect on the pattern of DNA polymorphism is investigated. The model also considers population bottleneck during domestication. Artificial selection during domestication is different from a regular selective sweep because artificial selection acts on alleles that may have been neutral variants before dom...

through the last three decades different seismological and engineering approaches for the generation of artificial earthquakes have been proposed. selection of an appropriate method for the generation of applicable artificial earthquake accelerograms (aeas) has been a challenging subject in the time history analysis of the structures in the case of the absence of sufficient recorded accelerogra...

We developed one stochastic model for intelligent selection of software components. The selection is done using a XML file containing the most relevant characteristics for each component. XML file has an extra field called "pheromone", which is a concept taken from ant colonies systems. This algorithm can be used for component, service and resource selection; this is possible because our model ...

Coding values (or preferences) directly into an artificial agent is a very challenging task, while value selection (or valuelearning, or value-loading) allows agents to learn values from their programmers, other humans or their environments in an interactive way. However, there is a conflict between agents learning their future values and following their current values, which motivates agents t...

The term Artificial Intelligence or “AI” has been used since the 1960s to describe the programmed intelligence contained in “machines that think.” While many of the early attempts to build AI systems were unsuccessful, today’s combination of fast computers, unlimited memory and statistical methods that complement the logic in AI systems has led to many successes. Today, AI programs can land a p...