Search results for "Artificial life"
showing 10 items of 12 documents
Un cuento de robots : La hija cibernética de descartes
2021
French philosopher René Descartes is today valued as a forerunner of the studies of human mind, artificial intelligence and robotic systems. Throughout his work there are large references to automata and the possibility of artificial life, as well as an assessment of the differences between rational behavior of human beings and the purely mechanical of animals and automata. In addition to these references, there is a fable about the creation by the philosopher of an automaton that replicated his deceased daughter Francine, a story that is well known among the French and Anglo-Saxon specialists, but not so much in the Spanish ones, which is what settles this short work
Guest editors' introduction: special issue on sensor evolution.
2001
Artificial life researchers, in their attempts to create life-as-it-could-be, have widely studied both the behavior of animals and artifacts. Early precursors of life-like artificial systems such as Grey Walter’s tortoises [4] or Valentino Braitenberg’s vehicles [1] were already demonstrating that ALife research is strongly motivated by the desire to understand and create life-like behavior and (neural) control. Creating life-like behavior in simulations or robots has increased our understanding of the design and evolution of controllers for artificial systems. Despite the interrelationship between behavior, sensors, and other morphological characteristics of animal systems, the evolution o…
The ten grand challenges of synthetic life
2011
The construction of artificial life is one of the main scientific challenges of the Synthetic Biology era. Advances in DNA synthesis and a better understanding of regulatory processes make the goal of constructing the first artificial cell a realistic possibility. This would be both a fundamental scientific milestone and a starting point of a vast range of applications, from biofuel production to drug design. However, several major issues might hamper the objective of achieving an artificial cell. From the bottom-up to the selection-based strategies, this work encompasses the ten grand challenges synthetic biologists will have to be aware of in order to cope with the task of creating life i…
Strategies for accelerating ant colony optimization algorithms on graphical processing units
2007
Ant colony optimization (ACO) is being used to solve many combinatorial problems. However, existing implementations fail to solve large instances of problems effectively. In this paper we propose two ACO implementations that use graphical processing units to support the needed computation. We also provide experimental results by solving several instances of the well-known orienteering problem to show their features, emphasizing the good properties that make these implementations extremely competitive versus parallel approaches.
RNA viruses: a bridge between life and artificial life
1995
RNA viruses can be an adequate bridge between life and artificial life. Under experimental conditions the parameters that in last instance are responsible for the evolution of replicons resembling primitive life forms can be easily studied. One year of a RNA virus evolving may be equivalent to one million years of an evolving DNA-based entity. High mutation rates as well as very short life cycles permit the capability of observing evolutionary effects in the lifetime of a human observer. Another important feature of RNA viruses, functionally related to its mutation rate, is the genome length, which ranges between 3 and 30 Kb, probably the shortest lengths with the highest estimated mutation…
A universal definition of life: autonomy and open-ended evolution.
2004
Life is a complex phenomenon that not only requires individual self-producing and self- sustaining systems but also a historical-collective organization of those individual systems, which brings about characteristic evolutionary dynamics. On these lines, we propose to define univer- sally living beings as autonomous systems with open-ended evolution capacities, and we claim that all such systems must have a semi-permeable active boundary (membrane), an energy trans- duction apparatus (set of energy currencies) and, at least, two types of functionally interdependent macromolecular components (catalysts and records). The latter is required to articulate a 'phenotype- genotype' decoupling that…
Panel Summary: Behavioural Models
1997
The aim of this paper is to report the panel discussion on behavioural models of human or machine agents interacting with the environment. In particular the following hot points will been analysed: a framework for describing behaviour; learning and evolution; closure and teleonomy when it comes to behaviour; the perception-learning-planning loop; the information integration at the (pre)attentive level; knowing by acting and knowing by computing.
On a Quantitative Measure for Modularity Based on Information Theory
2005
The concept of modularity appears to be crucial for many questions in the field of Artificial Life research. However, there have not been many quantitative measures for modularity that are both general and viable. In this paper we introduce a measure for modularity based on information theory. Due to the generality of the information theory formalism, this measure can be applied to various problems and models; some connections to other formalisms are presented.
Designing a Simulation Model of a Self-Maintaining Cellular System
1999
This paper deals with the problem of finding a suitable framework for designing computer simulations that could help us determine the minimal requirements (both material and organizational) for the origin of the first full-fledged autonomous systems. The design of a particular model that takes into account some fundamental thermodynamic requirements is offered and discussed. Behind this work, there is a belief that Artificial Life models can inform biology on several fundamental questions (such as the origin and definition of life) but only provided that they assume more realistic and grounded premises to lead us to more conclusive results.
Strategies for Making Life
2014
Synthetic biology is a multifaceted discipline and the pathways towards an artificial cell are diverse. Top-down strategies seek simplification of genomes, their chemical synthesis and transplantation into a cell chassis. In the long term, scientists hope to have genomic platforms to reinvent metabolic networks capable of producing molecules of biotechnological interest. On the other hand, a bottom-up strategy relies on the chemical implementation of fundamental concepts such as self-reproduction, self-replication and self-maintaining systems. In addition to the artificial synthesis of simplified genomes and protocells, some scientists explore xenobiology, or making life as we do not know i…