showing 2 related works from this author
Artificial organisms as tools for the development of psychological theory: Tolman's lesson
2007
In the 1930s and 1940s, Edward Tolman developed a psychological theory of spatial orientation in rats and humans. He expressed his theory as an automaton (the ‘‘schematic sowbug’’) or what today we would call an ‘‘artificial organism.’’ With the technology of the day, he could not implement his model. Nonetheless, he used it to develop empirical predictions which tested with animals in the laboratory. This way of proceeding was in line with scientific practice dating back to Galileo. The way psychologists use artificial organisms in their work today breaks with this tradition. Modern ‘‘artificial organisms’’ are constructed a posteriori, working from experimental or ethological observations…
Breedbot: An Edutainment Robotics System to Link Digital and Real World
2007
The paper describes Breedbot an edutainment software and hardware system that could be used to evolve autonomous agents in digital (software) world and to transfer the evolved minds in physical agents (robots). The system is based on a wide variety of Artificial Life techniques (Artificial Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms, User Guided Evolutionary Design and Evolutionary Robotics). An user without any computer programming skill can determine the robot behaviour. Breedbot was used as a didactic tool in teaching Evolutionary Biology and as a futuristic toy by several Science Centers. The digital side of Breedbot is downloadable from www.isl.unina.it/breedbot.