The high-level of abstraction, concurrency, and real-time features of Ada 95 are used to closely simulate the development of salps swarms (salps are marine macroplanktonic animals). Artificial creatures which behave like real salps (they move in space, feed, grow, metabolize, and reproduce by alternating sexual and asexual generations) are simulated in scaled down monotonous real-time. Each cre...

Aging is an important biological process that affects all creatures. For humans, age-related diseases and the question of why we age and die also have tremendous social and philosophical impact. We can therefore expect that models to study mechanisms of the aging process will always attract much interest. Until recently, the mutant model approach to study molecular mechanisms of aging has been ...

The Spider Woman or Grandmother Spider legends are part of the creation mythology for several southwestern American Indian tribes, including the Hopi, Pueblo, and Navajo. One story says that in the beginning of time only two beings existed: Tawa, the Sun God, with the powers of all that is above; and Spider Woman, the Earth Goddess, with the powers of all that is below. The Sun God imagined the...

13.1 Abstract We discuss the possibility and the meaning of the claim that plants are cognitive from the perspective of Embodied Cognition. In Embodied Cognition, the notion of cognition can be interpreted very broad and applies to many free-moving creatures. In this chapter, we discuss whether and, if so, how this approach applies to intelligence in plants. Building on work from ‘plant neurobi...

In Darwin’s world the user creates robot-like graphical creatures with behavior defined by a simple programming language. These creatures migrate around a small two-dimensional grid, each according to its simple program created by the user. The GUI application that controls and displays the location of these creatures must interpret the program instructions supplied in a simple text file for ea...

In the world of living creatures, “simple minded” animals often cooperate to achieve common goals with amazing performance. One can consider this idea in the context of robotics, and suggest models for programming goaloriented behavior into the members of a group of simple robots lacking global supervision. This can be done by controlling the local interactions between the robot agents, to have...

I propose a conceptual framework for emotions according to which they are best understood as the feedback mechanism a creature possesses in virtue of its function to learn. More specifically, emotions can be neatly modeled as a measure of harmony in a certain kind of constraint satisfaction problem. This measure can be used as error for weight adjustment (learning) in an unsupervised connection...

Representations of monstrosity in literature reveal the cultural tensions specific historical periods, as collective social fears become embodied by creatures intended to disturb their audiences. Gothic novels late Victorian Era rely on these representations darkness society, and different monsters created authors reflect various views norms, particularly relation gender. This essay focuses Bra...