Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life

Book Overview

Artificial life embodies a recent and important conceptual step in modem science: asserting that the core of intelligence and cognitive abilities is the same as the capacity for living. The recent surge of interest in artificial life has pushed a whole range of engineering traditions, such as control theory and robotics, beyond classical notions of goal and planning into biologically inspired notions of viability and adaptation, situatedness and operational...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262720191
• ISBN13: 9780262720199
• Release Date: April 1992
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 534 Pages
• Weight: 3.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 8.3" x 10.8"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

timid steps towards artificial life

While the subtitle says Artificial Life, the contents are actually only a timid step in that direction. The book came out in 1992 and even now in 2008/9, we are still far from any "true" artificial life. Instead, the book's papers are on more limited topics. Like related to neural networks implementing vision. Or on genetic algorithms and programming. A bunch of papers are in robotics. Describing experiments using electromechanical devices with various control algorithms, for tasks like walking. One paper is off on a different tangent. It looks at dynamics of artificial markets, where there are multiple software agents doing buys and sells. A possible ecology of agents and their behaviour is mooted.