Seminar tomorrow morning
Gaurav Sukhatme
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CSGO, the Computer Science Graduate Organization,
sponsors seminars to bring together students and
researchers in the areas of Computer Science and
Engineering, introducing the students to the
researchers and providing a chance for the
researchers to get to know the students.
Some of the talks during the semester will be given
by senior Ph.D students.
There will be one seminar every week of approximately
one hour duration followed by a question and answer
session.
The seminar is at 10:00 a.m. every Tuesday morning
in SAL 324.
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Weak artificial life: an introduction
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Speaker : J. J. Merelo
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ABSTRACT
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The main purpose of this talk is to introduce a part of artificial life
devoted to create worlds inside a machine, and little bugs that thrive
inside these worlds.
These bugs must have two minimal characteristics, in order to be considered
a-alive: they must learn, ie, they must adapt at an individual level to a
changing environment; and they must evolve, so that the species becomes
(hopefully!) more suitable for survival.
These two ways of learning/adaptation, ontogenetic on a lifetime, and
philogenetic in a species lifespan, leads to think of two types of
algorithms to implement some way of artificial life: neural networks and
genetic algorithms.
In some way, we have to genetically code the response of the bug (that, in
our case, we will call mbiti) to its environment, make this response
adaptive, and make the behaviour evolve by genetical methods.
This weak form of artificial life, in which no reference is made to the
outer world, contrasts with a "strong" form of artificial life, that deals
with machines that must survive in a real and more or less constrained
environment.
In our talk we will try to introduce several weak artificial lifeforms,
including our own, the mbitiworld, and how these can be useful for the
strong form of alife.
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Date : Tuesday 10/27/92
Time : 10:00 a.m.
Place: SAL 324
Host : CSGO
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