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20 August 1998
Contributed by William Riedel
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD

An overview of the work of Larry Yaeger, referred to in the Artificial Life section of this paper, is available at http://www.beanblossom.in.us/larryy/polyworld.html.

There are QuickTime videos illustrating elements of behavior in his artificial ecosystem PolyWorld at http://www.ina.fr/CS/BDD/fich_046.en.html.

Another Artificial Life project with movie demonstrations on the Internet is that by Demetri Terzopoulos et al. (1995, 1996). See: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~dt/alife.

These researchers developed artificial fishes with muscle actuators and functional fins that can see their environment, move in accordance with biomechanic and hydrodynamic principles, and utilize learning algorithms to acquire efficiency in locomotion by means of optimization. This type of work may well find application in paleobiology, for example in determining likely constraints on the behavior of an animal known only from its skeleton and muscle attachments, assuming a given scope of functions of its nervous system.

REFERENCES

Terzopoulos, D., Tu, X.. and Grzeszczuk, R. 1995. Artificial fishes: autonomous locomotion, perception, behavior, and learning in a simulated physical world. Artificial Life, 1:327-351.

Terzopoulos, D., Rabie, T. and Grzeszczuk, R. 1996. Perception and learning in artificial animals. Artificial Life, 5:313-320.