Robot life: simulation and participation in the study of evolution and social behavior.

This paper explores the case of using robots to simulate evolution, in particular the case of Hamilton's Law. The uses of robots raises several questions that this paper seeks to address. The first concerns the role of the robots in biological research: do they simulate something (life, evolution, sociality) or do they participate in something? The second question concerns the physicality of the robots: what difference does embodiment make to the role of the robot in these experiments. Thirdly, how do life, embodiment and social behavior relate in contemporary biology and why is it possible for robots to illuminate this relation? These questions are provoked by a strange similarity that has not been noted before: between the problem of simulation in philosophy of science, and Deleuze's reading of Plato on the relationship of ideas, copies and simulacra

Control in living systems : an exploration of the cybernetic properties of interactive behaviour

xii, 127 leaves : ill. ; 29 cmMany types of animal behaviour, especially seemingly complex social interactions, have been attributed to the existence of complex cognitive mechanisms, underpinned by stimulus-response (S-R) rules. Indeed, as speci c behaviours are analyzed in greater and greater detail, the increasing number of minor variations observed, even under tightly-controlled experimental conditions, seem to necessitate the operation of increasingly powerful computational devices. An alternate view, inspired by cybernetic theory, is that what is important is not the speci c behaviours used by animals, but the goal of the organism in a particular context. In this thesis, a closed-loop cybernetic methodology for understanding behaviour is developed and implemented. Evidence is presented that, not only do at least some behaviours of animals function like engineered control systems, but also that this type of architecture is widespread in phylogenetic terms, relatively robust to interference, and able to be arti cially reproduced. Implications for the study of the behaviour of all organisms are discussed