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Agents and Artificial Life

Aspen mimics societal behavior

Aspen mimics societal behavior. Edupage, 16 March 97. "A new economic computer model called Aspen is being hailed by economists as "the best thing that's come along in a long time" for predicting and analyzing macroeconomic data. The program, developed at Sandia National Laboratories, creates a make-believe world comprising up to 10,000 households plus 1,500 factories. By manipulating certain factors, economists can watch the behavior of the agents and use that data for economic forecasting. Aspen's results have turned up some surprises -- during an economic slump, "the firms learned to cooperate," says a Sandia economist. "We didn't put that into the software. But when things stayed sour, the firms got together and helped each other out." The size of Aspen's world is vital: "With thousands of players, you see behavior you wouldn't get in macro models," says the software's creator, who dreams of models with 100,000 agents or more. The software is useful for analyzing the causes of business cycles, both nationally and in specific industries. (Business Week 17 Mar 97)". See Prototype computer program models dynamics of US economy -- Aspen adapts, incorporates randomness of real world for more information.

From Animals to Animats 4

From Animals to Animats 4 - Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, September 9th-13th, 1996, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, edited by Pattie Maes, Maja J. Mataric, Jean-Arcady Meyer, Jordan Pollack, and Stewart W. Wilson. From Animals to Animats 4 brings together the latest research at the frontier of an exciting new approach to understanding intelligence. The contributors represent a broad range of interests from artificial intelligence and robotics to ethology and the neurosciences. Unifying these approaches is the notion of "animat" - an artificial animal, either simulated by a computer or embodied in a robot, which must survive and adapt in progressively more challenging environments. The 66 contributions focus particularly on well-defined models, computer simulations, and built robots in order to help characterize and compare various principles and architectures capable of inducing adaptive behavior in real or artificial animals. Topics, all from the perspective of adaptive behavior, include: The Animat Approach to Adaptive Behavior, Perception and Motor Control, Action Selection and Behavioral Sequences, Internal World Models and Navigation, Motivation and Emotions, Learning, Evolution, Coevolution, and Collective Behavior. Complex Adaptive Systems series, A Bradford Book, October 1996, 600 pp., $65.00 paperback, ISBN 0-262-63178-4-3. MIT Press. 12/13/96

Artificial Life Games Homepage

Artificial Life Games Homepage edited by L. Pagliarini, Institute of Psychology of the C.N.R. (National Research Council) in Rome, Italy. "Welcome to the Artificial Life Games Homepage that contains informations about Games developed by the means of ALife techniques. You can find all links and addresses of people involved in this kind of activity. Moreover, some good links to people, all around the world, that work on ALife Demos (and ALife in general) can be found." 9/3/96

Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms

Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms, edited by Richard K. Belew and Melanie Mitchell, Proceedings Volume XXVI, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1996. "A meeting held at the Santa Fe Institute during the summer of 1993 brought together a small group of biologists, psychologists, and computer scientists with shared interests in questions such as these. This volume consists of approximately two dozen papers that explore interacting adaptive systems from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. About half the articles are classic, seminal references on the subject, ranging from biologists like Lamarck and Waddington to psychologists like Piaget and Skinner. The other papers represent new work by the workshop participants. The role played by mathematical and computational tools, both as models of natural phenomena and as algorithms useful in their own right, is particularly emphasized in these new papers. In all cases the chapters have been augmented by specially written prefaces. In the case of the reprinted classics, the prefaces help to put the older papers in a modern context. For the new papers, the prefaces have been written by colleagues from a discipline other than the paper's authors, and highligh, for example, what a computer scientist can learn from a biologist's model, or vice versa. Through these cross-disciplinary "dialogues" and a glossary collecting multidisciplinary connotations of pivotal terms, the process of interdisciplinary investigation itself becomes a central theme." 8/9/96

Massively Parallel Microworlds

Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams, Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds, Mitchel Resnick, 1994, Complex Adaptive Systems series. MIT Press, A Bradford Book, ISBN 0-262-18162-2, 192 pp., $24.95 (cloth). Resnick discusses decentralized systems, self-organizing phenomena and their simulation using the massively parallel programming language StarLogo. 7/22/96

Swarm

Swarm is a software package for multi-agent simulation of complex systems being developed at The Santa Fe Institute. Swarm is intended to be a useful tool for researchers in a variety of disciplines, especially artificial life. The basic architecture of Swarm is the simulation of collections of concurrently interacting agents: with this architecture, we can implement a large variety of agent based models. Swarm runs on Unix machines running GNU Objective C and X windows. The beta release is available for download to the general public and source code is freely available under GNU Licensing terms. 7/21/96

Complex Adaptive Systems

Links to CAS resources.

Autonomous characters

Characters, improvisation, and ... is Craig Reynolds's collection of references to autonomous charactors that can improvise and react to their environment. 7/21/96

New Fungus Eater Experiments

Paper: New Fungus Eater Experiments, Thomas Wehrle, Université de Genève, Switzerland. Adapted from: Wehrle, T. (1994). New fungus eater experiments. In P. Gaussier, & J.-D. Nicoud (Eds.), From perception to action (pp. 400-403). Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society Press. ABSTRACT: though there seems to be a high agreement among researchers that the concept of autonomous agents should also be applied in Psychology, especially in Emotion Psychology, most work did not exceed the theoretical level yet. One reason obviously is the lack of adequate tools for applying and exploring this concept. This paper describes, on the bases of an implemented software package, what such a tool could look like. This simulation package has already been used for several applications. As an example we discuss an application that implements the basic concepts of the Emotional (or social) Fungus Eater of Masanao Toda. 5/9/96
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