Zusammenfassung
This paper discusses a computer model of living
organisms and the ecology they exist in called
PolyWorld. PolyWorld attempts to bring together all the
principle components of real living systems into a
single artificial (man-made) living system. PolyWorld
brings together biologically motivated genetics, simple
simulated physiologies and metabolisms, Hebbian
learning in arbitrary neural network architectures, a
visual perceptive mechanism, and a suite of primitive
behaviors in artificial organisms grounded in an
ecology just complex enough to foster speciation and
inter-species competition. Predation, mimicry, sexual
reproduction, and even communication are all supported
in a straightforward fashion. The resulting survival
strategies, both individual and group, are purely
emergent, as are the functionalities embodied in their
neural network &\#034;brains&\#034;. Complex
behaviors resulting from the simulated neural activity
are unpredictable, and change as natural selection acts
over multiple generations. In many ways, PolyWorld may
be thought of as a sort of electronic primordial soup
experiment, in the vein of Urey and Miller&\#039;s
33 classic experiment, only commencing at a much
higher level of organization. While one could claim
that Urey and Miller really just threw a bunch of
ingredients in a pot and watched to see what happened,
the reason these men made a contribution to science
rather than ratatouille is that they put the right
ingredients in the right pot ... and watched to see
what happened. Here we start with software-coded
genetics and various simple nerve cells
(lightsensitive, motor, and unspecified neuronal) as
the ingredients, and place them in a competitive
ecological crucible which subjects them to an
internally consistent physics and the process of
natural selectio...
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