The View from Elsewhere: Perspectives on ALife Modelling
The View from Elsewhere: Perspectives on ALife Modelling (2002)
Michael Wheeler, Seth Bullock, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Jason Noble, Mark Bedau, Philip Husbands, Simon Kirby, Anil Seth, Artificial Life 8, to appear.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/wheeler02view.html
Came across this when searching for Edinburgh and ALife. The eight panelists at the 6th European Conference on Artificial Life in Prague in 2001 express the following views:
Mark Bedau: ALife is a philosophical endeavour. Armchair simulations and armchair philosphy. May not find any underlying principles, hallmarks of complex life, though that's the goal. Philosophers should use simulation as a method.
Michael Wheeler: ALife is NOT a philosophical method. ALife models are NOT thought experiments. They are real enough experiments and real enough models, much as mathematical models in biology.
Seth Bullock: ALife simulations could be the bridge between theoretical and empirical/field biologists who find it hard to digest the mathematics. Models become a tool for communication. Suggests hastening the process of developing and deciding on formal, orthodox, well understood ways of communicating model specifications and results.
Anil Seth: Individual Based Models (IBMs) were seen as mediators between theoretical and empirical biology but 10 years hence, that's not always been the case. Because "IBMs are hard to develop, hard to communicate, and hard to understand. The abundance of free parameters runs the risk of WYWIWYG (what-you-want-is-what-you-get)". However, he thinks the same flexibility of ALife models encourages re-evaluating theoretical dogmas.
Jason Noble: ALife models have demonstrated how selective pressures could result in simple signalling systems in animals, but not shown much about how human language could have evolved out of such a system. Linguistics treats the former as given and is more interested in the latter. ALifers should concentrate on specific language evolution models.
Simon Kirby: ALife techniques important to lingustics because they could help checking claims of explanatory linguistics. Three adaptive systems - Learning a language involves the adaptation (within a lifetime) of internal representations of utterances; Languages adapt to the biases inherent in the learning mechanism over a historical time scale; The innate specification of learning biases adapts on a biological time-scale to make the languages that emerge from the cultural processes learnable by children.
Philip Husbands: Uses the analogy of the Ratio Club (Alan Turing, Ross Ashby, Grey Walter, Jack Good, Thomas Gold, Albert Uttley, Donald Mackay, Horace Barlow, DA Scholl, P Merton, Eliot Slater) to show how cross disciplinary collaborations between ALife and Biology are a must.
Ezequiel Di Paolo: Cybernetics' main tenet was that the mind is a manifestation of physics and should be studied using the methods of physics. Gestalt psychologists and neurophysiologists protested because its reductive atomism was not justified empirically. Which banner should ALife follow - a flag of convenience, a fruitful exploration of ideas, or as cybernetics, a discipline meant to do the job of other disciplines, only with a different, more abstract approach.
A summary of the reactions of the panelists noted that most saw ALife as an inter disciplinary collaboration, a space for people to try out new ideas/ techniques, that could then be incorporated into the parent discipline (biology, economics, etc). But some argued it's independent status, and argued for the strong ALife position - where the goal is to create novel forms of life.
Michael Wheeler, Seth Bullock, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Jason Noble, Mark Bedau, Philip Husbands, Simon Kirby, Anil Seth, Artificial Life 8, to appear.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/wheeler02view.html
Came across this when searching for Edinburgh and ALife. The eight panelists at the 6th European Conference on Artificial Life in Prague in 2001 express the following views:
Mark Bedau: ALife is a philosophical endeavour. Armchair simulations and armchair philosphy. May not find any underlying principles, hallmarks of complex life, though that's the goal. Philosophers should use simulation as a method.
Michael Wheeler: ALife is NOT a philosophical method. ALife models are NOT thought experiments. They are real enough experiments and real enough models, much as mathematical models in biology.
Seth Bullock: ALife simulations could be the bridge between theoretical and empirical/field biologists who find it hard to digest the mathematics. Models become a tool for communication. Suggests hastening the process of developing and deciding on formal, orthodox, well understood ways of communicating model specifications and results.
Anil Seth: Individual Based Models (IBMs) were seen as mediators between theoretical and empirical biology but 10 years hence, that's not always been the case. Because "IBMs are hard to develop, hard to communicate, and hard to understand. The abundance of free parameters runs the risk of WYWIWYG (what-you-want-is-what-you-get)". However, he thinks the same flexibility of ALife models encourages re-evaluating theoretical dogmas.
Jason Noble: ALife models have demonstrated how selective pressures could result in simple signalling systems in animals, but not shown much about how human language could have evolved out of such a system. Linguistics treats the former as given and is more interested in the latter. ALifers should concentrate on specific language evolution models.
Simon Kirby: ALife techniques important to lingustics because they could help checking claims of explanatory linguistics. Three adaptive systems - Learning a language involves the adaptation (within a lifetime) of internal representations of utterances; Languages adapt to the biases inherent in the learning mechanism over a historical time scale; The innate specification of learning biases adapts on a biological time-scale to make the languages that emerge from the cultural processes learnable by children.
Philip Husbands: Uses the analogy of the Ratio Club (Alan Turing, Ross Ashby, Grey Walter, Jack Good, Thomas Gold, Albert Uttley, Donald Mackay, Horace Barlow, DA Scholl, P Merton, Eliot Slater) to show how cross disciplinary collaborations between ALife and Biology are a must.
Ezequiel Di Paolo: Cybernetics' main tenet was that the mind is a manifestation of physics and should be studied using the methods of physics. Gestalt psychologists and neurophysiologists protested because its reductive atomism was not justified empirically. Which banner should ALife follow - a flag of convenience, a fruitful exploration of ideas, or as cybernetics, a discipline meant to do the job of other disciplines, only with a different, more abstract approach.
A summary of the reactions of the panelists noted that most saw ALife as an inter disciplinary collaboration, a space for people to try out new ideas/ techniques, that could then be incorporated into the parent discipline (biology, economics, etc). But some argued it's independent status, and argued for the strong ALife position - where the goal is to create novel forms of life.
posted by Sujai at 20:28
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