Open Problems in Artificial Life

Mark A. Bedau; John S. McCaskill; Norman H. Packard; Steen Rasmussen; Chris Adami; David G. Green; Takashi Ikegami; Kunihiko Kaneko; Thomas S. Ray

doi:10.1162/106454600300103683

Open Problems in Artificial Life

Artificial Life ◽

10.1162/106454600300103683 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 6 (4) ◽

pp. 363-376 ◽

Cited By ~ 154

Author(s):

Mark A. Bedau ◽

John S. McCaskill ◽

Norman H. Packard ◽

Steen Rasmussen ◽

Chris Adami ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Artificial Life ◽

Grand Challenge ◽

Major Advance ◽

Fundamental Issue ◽

Open Problems

This article lists fourteen open problems in artificial life, each of which is a grand challenge requiring a major advance on a fundamental issue for its solution. Each problem is briefly explained, and, where deemed helpful, some promising paths to its solution are indicated.

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Artificial Life as a Tool for Biological Inquiry

Artificial Life ◽

10.1162/artl.1993.1.1_2.1 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 1 (1_2) ◽

pp. 1-13 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Charles Taylor ◽

David Jefferson

Keyword(s):

Cultural Evolution ◽

Artificial Life ◽

Living Systems ◽

Grand Challenge ◽

Open Problems ◽

Maintenance Of Sex ◽

Open Questions ◽

Shifting Balance ◽

The Origin Of Life ◽

Natural Life

Artificial life embraces those human-made systems that possess some of the key properties of natural life. We are specifically interested in artificial systems that serve as models of living systems for the investigation of open questions in biology. First we review some of the artificial life models that have been constructed with biological problems in mind, and classify them by medium (hardware, software, or “wetware”) and by level of organization (molecular, cellular, organismal, or population). We then describe several “grand challenge” open problems in biology that seem especially good candidates to benefit from artificial life studies, including the origin of life and self-organi- zation, cultural evolution, origin and maintenance of sex, shifting balance in evolution, the relation between fitness and adaptedness, the structure of ecosystems, and the nature of mind.

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Thirty Years of Computational Autopoiesis: A Review

Artificial Life ◽

10.1162/1064546041255548 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 10 (3) ◽

pp. 277-295 ◽

Cited By ~ 49

Author(s):

Barry McMullin

Keyword(s):

Research Program ◽

Artificial Life ◽

Living Systems ◽

Basic Question ◽

Santa Fe ◽

Open Problems ◽

Methodological Problems ◽

Humberto Maturana ◽

Distinctive Role

Computational autopoiesis—the realization of autopoietic entities in computational media—holds an important and distinctive role within the field of artificial life. Its earliest formulation by Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, and Ricardo Uribe was seminal in demonstrating the use of an artificial, computational medium to explore the most basic question of the abstract nature of living systems—over a decade in advance of the first Santa Fe Workshop on Artificial Life. The research program it originated has generated substantive demonstrations of progressively richer, lifelike phenomena. It has also sharply illuminated both conceptual and methodological problems in the field. This article provides an integrative overview of the sometimes disparate work in this area, and argues that computational autopoiesis continues to provide an effective framework for addressing key open problems in artificial life.

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Modeling Adaptive Autonomous Agents

Artificial Life ◽

10.1162/artl.1993.1.1_2.135 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 1 (1_2) ◽

pp. 135-162 ◽

Cited By ~ 109

Author(s):

Pattie Maes

Keyword(s):

Animal Behavior ◽

Artificial Life ◽

Autonomous Agents ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Time Dependent ◽

New Wave ◽

Open Problems ◽

New Approach ◽

Unpredictable Environment ◽

Main Ideas

One category of research in Artificial Life is concerned with modeling and building so-called adaptive autonomous agents, which are systems that inhabit a dynamic, unpredictable environment in which they try to satisfy a set of time-dependent goals or motivations. Agents are said to be adaptive if they improve their competence at dealing with these goals based on experience. Autonomous agents constitute a new approach to the study of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is highly inspired by biology, in particular ethology, the study of animal behavior. Research in autonomous agents has brought about a new wave of excitement into the field of AI. This paper reflects on the state of the art of this new approach. It attempts to extract its main ideas, evaluates what contributions have been made so far, and identifies its current limitations and open problems.

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OPEN-ENDED ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION

International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Applications ◽

10.1142/s1469026803000914 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 03 (02) ◽

pp. 167-175 ◽

Cited By ~ 31

Author(s):

RUSSELL K. STANDISH

Keyword(s):

Artificial Life ◽

A Priori ◽

Artificial Evolution ◽

Open Problems ◽

Organismal Complexity ◽

Forward Looking

Of all the issues discussed at Alife VII: Looking Forward, Looking Backward, the issue of whether it was possible to create an artificial life system that exhibits open-ended evolution of novelty is by far the biggest. Of the 14 open problems settled on as a result of debate at the conference, some 6 are directly, or indirectly related to this issue. Most people equate open-ended evolution with complexity growth, although a priori these seem to be different things. In this paper I report on experiments to measure the complexity of Tierran organisms, and show the results for a size-neutral run of Tierra. In this run, no increase in organismal complexity was observed, although organism size did increase through the run. This result is discussed, offering some signposts on path to solving the issue of open ended evolution.

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Toward Synthesizing Artificial Neural Networks that Exhibit Cooperative Intelligent Behavior: Some Open Issues in Artificial Life

Artificial Life ◽

10.1162/artl.1993.1.1_2.111 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 1 (1_2) ◽

pp. 111-134 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Michael G. Dyer

Keyword(s):

Animal Behavior ◽

Artificial Life ◽

Cooperative Behavior ◽

Learning Processes ◽

Open Problems ◽

Developmental Learning ◽

Biological Perspective ◽

Intelligent Behavior ◽

High Degree ◽

Open Issues

The tasks that animals perform require a high degree of intelligence. Animals forage for food, migrate, navigate, court mates, rear offspring, defend against predators, construct nests, and so on. These tasks commonly require social interaction/cooperation and are accomplished by animal nervous systems, which are the result of billions of years of evolution and complex developmental/learning processes. The Artificial Life (AL) approach to synthesizing intelligent behavior is guided by this biological perspective. In this article we examine some of the numerous open problems in synthesizing intelligent animal behavior (especially cooperative behavior involving communication) that face the field of AL, a discipline still in its infancy.

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Some Problems in Understanding the Solar Corona

International Astronomical Union Colloquium ◽

10.1017/s025292110002491x ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 144 ◽

pp. 1-9

Author(s):

A. H. Gabriel

Keyword(s):

Solar Corona ◽

Solar Atmosphere ◽

Theoretical Modelling ◽

Total System ◽

Major Advance ◽

X Ray ◽

Proper Perspective ◽

Space Observations

The development of the physics of the solar atmosphere during the last 50 years has been greatly influenced by the increasing capability of observations made from space. Access to images and spectra of the hotter plasma in the UV, XUV and X-ray regions provided a major advance over the few coronal forbidden lines seen in the visible and enabled the cooler chromospheric and photospheric plasma to be seen in its proper perspective, as part of a total system. In this way space observations have stimulated new and important advances, not only in space but also in ground-based observations and theoretical modelling, so that today we find a well-balanced harmony between the three techniques.

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