Course reflection

Here I will critically reflect on what I have learnt in this course..
Difficult decisions in my poster design
The hardest things here were deciding what to leave out without losing the main points and how much time to spend on presentational aspects i.e. you can tinker with colurs and backgrounds for ever and not progress the [...]

Papers 2 & 3 – Neurogenesis and synaptogenesis

Sung-Bae Cho  & Geum-Beom Song  - Evolving CAM-Brain to control a mobile robot
The idea of using trying to grow a useful network by use of local rules only is very interesting and has a clear parallel in nature. The use of a cellular automata is clever as this is a very clean expression of growing [...]

Paper 1of 3 – Neurogenesis and synaptogenesis

J. C. Astor & C. Adami – A Developmental Model for the Evolution of Artificial Neural Networks
The model of the aligning hexagonal occupy-able “spaces” is an effective and understandable simplification. I like the attempt to model the many factors during neural development including simultaneous cell and connection (axon/dendrite) growth.  A powerful feature is the inclusion [...]

Thoughts on my first paper

Well, that wasn’t toooo hard. After 3 years at university of being told I was unable to write in a sufficiently academic style and insisting on stooping to pop science this comes as rather a pleasant surprise. It would be nice to believe I had “cracked it” but I suspect that it had rather a [...]

What makes a good presentation?

Firstly, I would say it is critical to remember that “to present”  is not an intransitive verb .  There is a an object to whom it is directed – i.e. you (and I don’t mean the audience in general). What I’m saying is that a presentation can be fascinating or boring because of your interest [...]

Online Publications Again – Free to read?

Another huge issue for me has been whether a paper is available to read for free on the Internet or via one of the university’s subscriptions.   I find it baffling that the university is not subscribed to more journals (e.g. the IEEE ones which are very common in my field) but I barely need to [...]

My Peer Community

I am commenting on here on journals and conferences which are most relevant to my interests. Currently the journals I see most papers from are the Adaptive Systems journal and the Artificial Life journal . There also seem to be a lot of relevant papers published in conference proceedings e.g. the Alife conference which is [...]

Where’s (the) Wally

BTW there is a picture of me hidden in the header bar – see if you can spot it!

New Blog Header bar!

Created this by stiching photos of my studio. I like it!

Prolog project

Have had to face up to thinking about this. I think I’ve come up with something that actually uses Prolog as logic  – a semantic network. Need to be sure it will use recursion (yes) and lists (not sure, will have shoe-horn in somwhere) because there are marks attached to using these “amazing” features.