Fall 1995 Alife Workshop: Schedule of Topics and Moderators

(Held Friday, 3:10-4:30, 468D Heady Hall, unless otherwise indicated)

Sept 8: Review of Simple Minds, moderated by BILL ROBINSON (Phil), reading: "On What Building a Martian Three-Wheeled Iguana Tells Us About Complex Minds," by James Anderson.

Sept 15: Using genetic programming to solve divide-the-dollar games, moderated by DAN ASHLOCK (Math), reading: "GP-automata for Dividing the Dollar," by D. Ashlock.

Sept 22: Stuart Kauffman's "Fourth Law": How agents attempt to control the ruggedness of their fitness landscapes, moderated by GERRY SHEBLE (EE), reading: Lectures by Stuart Kauffman at the SFI Summer School, 1995.

Sept. 29: The evolution of communication, moderated by VERONICA DARK (Psy), reading: MacLennan and Burghardt, "Synthetic Ethology and the Evolution of cooperative communication," Adaptive Behavior 2 (1994), 161-188.

Oct 6: Program Discovery Using Adaptive Search Techniques, moderated by UNA-MAY O'REILLY (CS, Carleton U/MIT AI Lab), main reading: "Hybridized Cross-Over Based Search Techniques for Program Discovery" by U. O'Reilly and F. Oppacher.

Oct 13: Self-Organization of Hierarchies in Animal Societies, moderated by NICHOLAS LEWIN (Botany), readings by G. Theraulaz, E. Bonabeau, et al.

Oct 20, SPECIAL TIME 3:40-5:00: Modelling economies as complex adaptive systems, moderated by DICK DAY (Econ, U of South. Cal.), reading: "Existence Out of Equilibrium" by R. H. Day.

Oct. 27: Tradebots and trade networks, moderated by LEIGH TESFATSION (Econ), reading: selected sections of ISU Econ Report No. 37, "How Economists Can Get Alife."

Nov 3: Analysis of Neurocontrollers designed by simulated evolution, moderated by KARTHIK BALAKRISHNAN AND VASANT HONAVAR (CS, AI Research Group)

Nov 10: Use of GAs to find short-term strategies in a dynamic single good market, moderated by RICK HAWKINS (Econ), reading: paper draft.

Nov 17: A test suite of genetic programming problems, moderated by JIM LATHROP (CS).

Nov 24: THANKSGIVING BREAK Dec 1: Behavioral Foundations of Socio-Economic Games, moderated by BETSY HOFFMAN (Econ, Dean LAS), reading: paper of same title by E. Hoffman.

Dec 8: Using GAs for Energy Minimization, moderated by JAMIE MORRIS (Physics), reading: "Genetic Algorithm Energy Minimization for Point Charges on a Sphere," to appear in Physical Review B.