This paper examines the role of social rewards as a corrective mechanism for activities which generate externalities. The focus of this paper is on the circumstances under which social rewards provide effective and feasible incentive mechanism that may replace laws and regulations. In particular, social mechanism is effective only in a society in which individuals who care about their standing ...

Skepticism of the building block hypothesis (BBH) has previously been expressed on account of the weak theoretical foundations of this hypothesis and the anomalies in the empirical record of the simple genetic algorithm. In this paper we hone in on a more fundamental cause for skepticism—the extraordinary strength of some of the assumptions that undergird the BBH. Specifically, we focus on assu...

Biomedical signals contain features that represent physiological events, and each of these events has peaks. The analysis of biomedical signals for monitoring or diagnosing diseases requires the detection of these peaks, making event detection a crucial step in biomedical signal processing. Many researchers have difficulty detecting these peaks to investigate, interpret and analyze their corres...

It is striking that the concept of fitness although fundamental in evolutionary theory, still remains ambiguous. I argue here that time, although usually neglected, is an important parameter in regards to the concept of fitness. I will show some of the benefits of taking it seriously using the example of recent debates over evolutionary transitions in individuality. I start from Okasha’s assert...

Today, and especially in the future, soldiers have to be able to operate and maintain a large variety of devices connected to the cyber domain in whatever environment they are operating in. This places a high demand on soldiers’ cognitive abilities and mechanisms that humans use to process and store information. In this paper we study how motivation, gained by understanding the purpose of tasks...

Methods for automatic image interpretation based on the use of deformable template models have proved very successful. Whatever deformable template scheme is used, one of the basic requirements is a method for assessing the likelihood that a particular model instance is the correct interpretation of a given image. We describe a Bayesian 'fitness' measure which combines the likelihood of the mod...

Current theories regarding code growth (bloat) in genetic programming focus on the presence and growth of introns. In this paper we show for the first time that code growth can occur, albeit quite slowly, even in code that has a significant impact on fitness.

In the intertidal fish Bathygobius ramosus, larger males are more likely to reproduce than smaller ones due to male-male interactions and female preferences. Additionally, larger males are favored in foraging via intra-specific and inter-specific competition. Activity performance is also an important function associated with the ability to perform courtship, male-male interactions, and parental...

The alternative phenotype hypothesis contends that multiple phenotypes exist in a single genotype and are expressed by environmental or genetic cues. It further states that these multiple phenotypes will be maintained and improved in a population where the environment is unstable, in spite of the increased cost of this plasticity. In this work we propose a simple computational model to investig...