The Problem: While many robots in industry and research have proven capable of operating in complex environments, most robots still fall well short of living creatures in their ability to deal with extreme variations in their environment. Living creatures, by contrast, will typically cope in any environment to the extent that their physical bodies allow. Living creatures never give up trying to...

Plants are organisms whose great biological distance from humans has aroused cultural interest as powerful and/or dangerously unfamiliar creatures, especially during the Victorian period. «The Flowering of Strange Orchid» (1894), by Herbert George Wells, tells how an orchid collector is attacked to near death his latest acquisition. The plant attacks human with its «tentacle-like aerial rootlet...

In this workshop, I introduce some of the reasons for my fascination with alife and my desire to use it for music making. I also talk about some of the joys and sorrows of the collaboration process. Four alife worlds, Feeping Creatures, Spinners, Gakkimon Planet and Listening Sky are described in the order they were made. I talk about what I like and dislike about each one and how I would like ...

For the creation of a virtual 3D creature it is necessary an underlying structure that provides to it some desired capabilities. One of our main research objectives is creating a virtual 3D creature that resembles human behavior in an actual environment. In this paper, we propose a cognitive architecture inspired in the recent findings of the neuroscience which will represent the underlying str...