Complexes

For millennia people have wondered what makes the living different from the non-living. Beginning in the mid-1980s, artificial life has studied living systems using a synthetic approach: build life in order to understand it better, be it by means of software, hardware, or wetware. This review provides a summary of the advances that led to the development of artificial life, its current research topics, and open problems and opportunities. We classify artificial life research into 14 themes: origins of life, autonomy, self-organization, adaptation (including evolution, development, and learning), ecology, artificial societies, behavior, computational biology, artificial chemistries, information, living technology, art, and philosophy. Being interdisciplinary, artificial life seems to be losing its boundaries and merging with other fields. Aguilar W, Santamaría-Bonfil G, Froese T and Gershenson C (2014) The past, present, and future of artificial life. Front. Robot. AI 1:8. http://dx....

Upshot : The limitations of materialism for studying cognition have motivated alternative epistemologies based on information and computation. I argue that these alternatives are also inherently limited and that these limits can only be overcome by considering materialism, info-computationalism, and cognition at the same time. Open peer commentary on the article “ Info-computational Constructivism and Cognition ” by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic. Gershenson C. (2014) Info-computationalism or Materialism? Neither and Both. Constructivist Foundations 9(2) : 241–242. Available at  http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/9/2/241.gershenson

//Please forward to whom may be interested. The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) has an open call for postdoctoral fellowships to start in March, 2014 (with a close deadline!). Candidates should have obtained a PhD degree within the last three years and be under 36 years, both to the date of the beginning of the fellowship. The area of interests of candidates should fall within complex systems, artificial life, information, evolution, cognition, robotics, and/or philosophy. Interested candidates should send CV and a tentative project (1 paragraph) to cgg-at-unam.mx by Friday, August 2nd.   Full application package should be ready by Monday, August 5 at noon, Mexico City time. Projects can be inspired from:  http://turing.iimas.unam.mx/~cgg/projects.html Postdoctoral fellowships are between one and two years (after renewal). Spanish is not a requisite. Accepted candidates would be working at the Self-organizing Systems Lab ( http://turing.iimas.unam....

The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A prominent critique of this claim holds that when some part of the world is coupled to a cognitive system this does not necessarily entail that the part is also constitutive of that cognitive system. This critique is known as the "coupling-constitution fallacy". In this paper we respond to this reductionist challenge by using an evolutionary robotics approach to create a minimal model of two acoustically coupled agents. We demonstrate how the interaction process as a whole has properties that cannot be reduced to the contributions of the isolated agents. We also show that the neural dynamics of the coupled agents has formal properties that are inherently impossible for those neural networks in isolation. By keeping the complexity of the model ...

Edmonds, B. & C. Gershenson (2012).  Learning, Social Intelligence and the Turing Test - why an "out-of-the-box" Turing Machine will not pass the Turing Test .  I nvited talk at Turing Centenary Conference CiE 2012 ,  special session on "The Turing Test and Thinking Machines".  CPM Report No.: 12-215 Abstract : The Turing Test (TT) checks for human intelligence, rather than any putative general intelligence. It involves repeated interaction requiring learning in the form of adaption to the human conversation partner. It is a macro-level post-hoc test in contrast to the definition of a Turing Machine (TM), which is a prior micro-level definition. This raises the question of whether learning is just another computational process, i.e. can be implemented as a TM. Here we argue that learning or adaption is fundamentally different from computation, though it does involve processes that can be seen as computations. To illustrate this difference we compare (a) d...

This paper presents and overview of current and potential applications of living technology to urban problems. Living technology can be described as technology that exhibits the core features of living systems. These features can be useful to solve dynamic problems. In particular, urban problems concerning mobility, logistics, telecommunications, governance, safety, sustainability, and society and culture are presented, while solutions involving living technology are reviewed. Finally, the usefulness of describing cities as living systems is discussed. Gershenson, C. (2011). Living in Living Cities. C3 Report 2011.09.  http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3659

This essay explores the limits of Turing machines concerning the modeling of minds and suggests alternatives to go beyond those limits. Gershenson, C. (2011). Are Minds Computable? C3 Tech. Report 2011.08.  http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.3002

Today was the last day of competitions for my first RoboCup . Already on its 15th year, one of its goals is to have by 2050 human-size robots playing against the soccer world champions and winning. I thought that was far fetched, but after seeing some robots in action, it doesn't seem that impossible anymore. There are several different leagues, playing in simulations, wheeled and humanoid robots of different sizes. The simulated leagues can have complex strategies and make nice moves. Wheeled robots can move very fast and are very good at kicking. Team Water from China defeated TechUnited Eindhoven from The Netherlands in the final in an exciting 6-5. Those bots play good! At the human-robot match, Water tied 5-5 against an allowing group of team leaders. Humans could have easily won if they wished, but it was more of a friendly game... The humanoid robots are a bit slower, but still there is action packed excitement in some matches. The Nao robots are a bit slow, but they ca...

//Please forward to whom may be interested. The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) has an open call for postdoctoral fellowships. Candidates should have obtained a PhD degree within the last three years and be under 36 years, both to the date of the beginning of the fellowship. In previous years, there has been a 50% acceptance rate. Candidates are evaluated mainly by their number of papers published in ISI-indexed journals. The area of interests of candidates should fall within complex systems, artificial life, information, evolution, cognition, robotics, and/or philosophy. Interested candidates should send CV and a tentative project (1 paragraph) to cgg-at-unam.mx Projects can be inspired from: http://turing.iimas.unam.mx/~cgg/projects.html Postdoctoral fellowships are between one and three years (renewing each year). Spanish is not a requisite. Accepted candidates would be working at the Computer Science Department of the IIMAS ( http://turing.iimas.unam.mx...

Facebook offers great functionalities, it is easy, fun, extensible... However, it seems that like many things which are positive for many people (e.g. automobiles), they get overused with unintended consequences (e.g. traffic jams). OK, so I have 400+ friends on facebook. The problem is that I could spare like 5 minutes every other day to check the news feed. With so many people in my feed, I get what was posted 2 hours ago at most. Sure, there are ways of blocking applications, creating filters (e.g. with Better FB ), but this does not work for me. There are just too many posts I am not interested about, but I am interested in few things that most people post about. It is difficult to categorize. Where is artificial intelligence when it is needed? I believe that algorithms similar to anti-spam filters would be immensely useful on social networks. For example, I am interested about the English postings of my Iranian friends, but I cannot make much of their Farsi posts... For users, i...

I'll be co-chairing together with Giovanni Squillero  the Artificial Life/Robotics/Evolvable Hardware track at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO 2011) conference, to be held  in Dublin, Ireland, July 12-16, 2011. More info at the conference website:  http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2011/

My BEng thesis (from 2001) was just published as a book. You can order a hardcopy at Amazon.com . It is still available electronically in pdf and html . Gershenson, C. (2010 ). Artificial Societies of Intelligent Agents: Virtual Experiments of Individual and Social Behaviour . LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, ISBN 3838357736 . Summary : In this book we use artificial societies to understand and simulate adaptive behaviour and social processes. We obtain this in three parallel ways: First, we present a behaviours production system capable of reproducing a high number of properties of adaptive behaviour and of exhibiting emergent lower cognition. Second, we introduce a simple model for social action, obtaining emergent complex social processes from simple interactions of imitation and induction of behaviours in agents. And third, we present our approximation to a behaviours virtual laboratory, integrating our behaviours production system and our social action model in virtual animats. ...

My thesis was just published by LAP. This might be useful for anybody wanting a hardcopy of it. If you prefer printing it or reading electronically, it is still available here . Gershenson, C. (2010). Design and Control of Self-organizing Systems: Facing Complexity with Adaptation and Self-organization . LAP. Summary : Complex systems are usually difficult to design and control. There are several particular methods for coping with complexity, but there is no general approach to build complex systems. In this book I propose a methodology to aid engineers in the design and control of complex systems. This is based on the description of systems as self-organizing. Starting from the agent metaphor, the methodology proposes a conceptual framework and a series of steps to follow to find proper mechanisms that will promote elements to find solutions by actively interacting among themselves. A general introduction to complex thinking is given, while practical notions of complexity and self-...

Feedback, suggestions, and criticisms are more than welcome. Gershenson, C. (2010) "Computing Networks: A General Framework to Contrast Neural and Swarm Architectures". C3 Report No. 2010.01. Abstract : Computing Networks (CNs) are defined. These are used to generalize neural and swarm architectures, namely artificial neural networks, ant colony optimization, and particle swarm optimization. The description of these architectures as CNs allows their comparison, distinguishing which properties enable them to perform complex computations and exhibit complex cognitive abilities. In this context, the most relevant characteristics of CNs are the existence multiple dynamical and functional scales. Full paper : http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/1001.5244

When Google was released, it revolutionized the quality of search engines, transforming the world society: it enabled anyone with Internet access to find almost any information. Knowledge available to everyone. The next big technology to have a global effect might be WolframAlpha , to be released in a few weeks. Its main goal is in line with the main vision of the Internet: to make expert-level knowledge accessible to anyone. It is complementary to search engines, which find data. WolframAlpha computes structured data. I just listened to a preview webinar by Stephen Wolfram, the leader of the project where already several hundred people are working. In exploits the computational capabilities of Mathematica, huge databases and live feeds of structured data, an impressive free form linguistic analysis, and an automated presentation of relevant results. It does much more than mathematics (from sums to integrals) It can calculate interesting comparisons, e.g. GDP of countries, weather of ...

Call for Papers: Swarm Cognition Workshop http://laral.istc.cnr.it/swarm-cognition/Main_Page ----------------------------------------------------------------- The workshop is part of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2009 - http://cognitivesciencesociety.org/conference2009/ ) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Overview Swarm Cognition" is the juxtaposition of two relatively unrelated concepts that evoke, on the one hand, the power of collective behaviours displayed by natural swarms, and on the other hand the complexity of cognitive processes in the vertebrate brain. With this premise, the Swarm Cognition Workshop aims at promoting synergies between diverse disciplines such as cognitive neurosciences, psychology, ethology and swarm intelligence. Research work in Swarm Cognition aims at identifying the operational principles of cognitive behaviour by calling upon the underlying mechanisms of self-organising systems, i.e...

Work I did together with Seung Bae Cools was featured in the November/December 2008 issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems: The second story, "Autonomous Agents Take On City Driving," reports on current uses of AI technology to improve urban traffic flow. See the full text here (click on PDF on the right). You can find details of this work on Chapter 5 of my PhD thesis .

Alan Turing defined in 1936 the now well known "Turing Machine" to define computation. A Turing Machine is actually an abstract mathematical construction, which cannot be fully materialized, since it requires an infinite tape (memory). Nevertheless, people have been discussing their brains out on whether the human mind (whatever that may be) is computable or not. This is because people believe that if whatever our brains or minds do is computable, then (in principle) it could be modelled in a computer, thus reaching the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence: a machine with the same intellectual abilities as a human (whatever that may be). Still, computability as we understand it, i.e. Turing computability, i.e. a function that a Turing machine can perform, is only computability in theory . In practice , there are Turing-computable numbers that are not computable in practice by our computers, since there would not be enough time in the universe to calculate them, or memor...

The term "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) was coined at a conference in Dartmouth College, NH, in the summer of 1956, so this year has seen several celebrations, e.g. in Boston, Monte Verità , Paris... so Brussels couldn't be left behind! The AILab of the VUB organized a one day event at the Royal Flemish Academy for Arts and Sciences, with invited talks by people who have done advancements in AI in Flanders... so it was basically VUB people (i.e. ex-students of Luc Steels ) and a couple from Leuven. You can see the full info here (in Dutch). So, during and after the presentations, I realized how the expectations of AI have changed. In the 50's, people were predicting that we would have robots with humanlike intelligence in a few decades. In the 80's, a new wave of AI began to spread, namely with behaviour-based systems, neural networks, dynamical systems theory, and artificial life. Many of these were also aiming at humanlike intelligence (from the bottom-up), s...

I've added seven new cartoons to Complex Humour More cartoons @ Complex Humour .