Using a rule-based system for growing artificial neural networks, we have evolved controllers for physically simulated robotic "spiders". The controllers take their input from an “artificial retina” that senses other spiders and inanimate barrier objects in the environment, and must provide output to dynamically control the 18 degrees of freedom of the six legs of the robot every time step. We ...

The defining features of intelligence, consciousness and life are not clearly prescribed. We cannot say of X that if, and only if, it has properties p, q and r will it also have intelligence, be alive, or be conscious. What we tend to look for when ascribing inner states to another system – I shall use the term ‘system’ to cover both organic and inorganic entities and I shall examine three diff...

Communication through vocalizations is used by spotted hyenas and chimpanzees for coordination during hunting and for raising alarm calls in defense (Bullinger et al., 2011; Holekamp et al., 2007). Vocal signals are omni-directional and are therefore more effective than visual communication in these situations. In cooperative tasks, agents use these signals to pro-actively exchange information ...

Speciation is one of the most fundamental and important processes in evolutionary biology, resulting in the panoply of biological diversity found in the natural world. Speciation likewise has profound implications for artificial life, evolutionary computation, and evolutionary robotics, yet a great many aspects of it remain unexplored. Traditionally, speciation was mainly viewed as taking place...

In this paper, the strengths of the checkpoint-orientated modeling in synchronizing cell population are highlighted. Through different experiments, this work shows how to synchronize a population of asynchronous and heterogeneous cells with our proposed model of cell cycle. We will show that the probabilistic modeling undertaken accurately reproduces the dynamics of cell population under specif...

In mobile app ecosystems, an app can behave like a virus. Once downloaded, it may cause its user to recommend that app to friends who then may download the app and “infect” other friends. Epidemics occur when a small number of downloads causes a snowballing effect that results in a massive number of downloads (and consequently, a rich developer). This paper presents AppEco, the first Artificial...

Artificial life (ALife) is the attempt to create artificial instances of life in a variety of media, but primarily within the digital computer. As such, the field brings together computationally-minded biologists and biologically-minded computer scientists. I argue that this new field is filled with interesting philosophical issues. However, there is a dearth of philosophers actively conducting...

Artificial Life is the study of all phenomena of the living world through their reproduction in artificial systems. We argue that Artificial Life models of evolution and development offer a new set of theoretical and methodological tools for investigating Piaget’s ideas. The concept of an Artificial Life Neural Network (ALNN) is first introduced, and contrasted with the study of other recent ap...

Finding robust explanations of behaviours in Alife and related fields is made difficult by the lack of any formalised definition of robustness. A concerted effort to develop a framework which allows for robust explanations of those behaviours to be developed is needed, as well as a discussion of what constitutes a potentially useful definition for behavioural robustness. To this end, we describ...

We demonstrate how a novelty search algorithm can be used to create an open ended evolution system for 3-dimensional (3D) morphologies in which a constant evolutionary pressure exists for new shapes to be produced. In our platform, GReaNs, multicellular development starts from a single cell and all cells share the same genome and the same topology of the regulatory network. The size of the geno...