TIME!!

Have had very little time progress project work due to 4 main factors.
Wife’s end of PHD and upcoming viva.
half term – combined with the above
ATC course has continual drip of deadlines that are taking up all my available time. Which is why I’m writing this blog thing instead of doing my reading/study/project/paper-writing.
As a very non-confessional person [...]

Current Community Discussions

Have been looking at the themes for the ALife XI conference. The main gist seems to be towards parallels with biology, such as consciousness rather than robotics or genetic algorithms. Apparently the former field used to be an aLife area but became so mainstream that it became its own field with conferences.
According to Inman Harvey, [...]

Artificial Life – Publication

Have contacted Inman Harvey to follow up the idea of publication.
He has proposed joint paper (him as 2nd author) to Alife XI Conference in August (Southampton Uni).
I have agreed to go for this although the submission deadline is very tight.

Artificial Life – Project

Received project feedback from Inman Harvey.
Very pleased with comments:-
“This is a lovely example of how one can do a small piece of genuine research as an Alife assessment.
I think this is original, significant and publishable.”
“Very well designed experiments, proper thought gone into controls and sufficient runs for statisitcal significance. Results are important and well presented”.

Adaptive Systems – Projects discussion

Ran into Anikl Seth in the Inforamatics common room. Discussed ideas for projects for the course and for the summer.
He was unsure of the evolution idea – as am I.
He seemed to really like the other idea – my extension of Ezequiel D P ’s experiment with Ashby/plastic adapation by sensory inversion.
His main concern was [...]

Adaptive Systems – reviews of various papers

Lewontin & Gould  – The Spandrels of San Marcos and the Panglossian Paradigm 
Completed reading on 2 papers by Lewontin.
The most relevant idea for me coming out of these is the idea of the hitchhiker gene – inherited trait from individuals that have another (different) advantagous trait.
This ties in with my own ideas on how the [...]

Good technical writing

I’ve been reading the Richard Dawkins book The Ancestor’s Tale.
This takes the problem of “how do you talk about stages in evolution without implying that everything was leading up to and pointing at the appearance of humans as the ‘ultimate achievement’?”
He has the ingenious solution of starting with humans and working backwards, discussing each point [...]

Adaptive Systems – altered senses

Attended lectures on adating to changed/ missing or replaced senses.
The idea that adaptation to altered senses (e.g. inverted vision) is possible when other senses remain invariant (gravity etc) seems to have implications for the Di Paulo adapting agent experiment – where only a single,unsupported sense was distorted. A good idea for an AS project would be [...]