Alife Digest Number 005

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Alife Digest

 · 11 months ago

 
                        Artificial Life Digest, Number 5 
  
                           Thursday, March 15th 1990 
  
Issue's Topics: 
  
                          Information agents: Tiny Mud 
                            evolution for simulations 
                           Artificial Life Digest, #4 
                         Re: Artificial Life Digest, #4  
---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
  
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 90 16:16:39 PST 
From: gary%cs@ucsd.edu (Gary Cottrell) 
Subject: Information agents: Tiny Mud 

There is a simulated reality game called "Tiny Mud" where players 
can create rooms in a cave-like structure and place objects with 
certain attributes. They can also meet other players in the cave and converse. 
The game can cross machines through telnet ports as well. 

People have written FSM robots that go around collecting information in the 
cave - e.g., the cave changes shape every day because of players' activities, 
and these robots keep track of the map, as well as the locations of players 
in the cave. It would be possible to create one (in theory) that was indistinguishable 
in the short run from a real player.... 

Nici - do you want to add to that? 

gary cottrell 619-534-6640 Sec'y: 619-534-5288 FAX: 619-534-7029 
Computer Science and Engineering C-014 
UCSD,  
La Jolla, Ca. 92093 
gary@cs.ucsd.edu (ARPA) 
{ucbvax,decvax,akgua,dcdwest}!sdcsvax!gary (USENET) 
gcottrell@ucsd.edu (BITNET) 

------------------------------ 
  
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 90 17:46:41 PST 
From: stork@psych.stanford.edu (David Stork) 
Subject: evolution for simulations 

Fellow ALifer, 

     I've been contacted by a prominent publisher to compile a set 
of important BIOLOGICAL papers, providing a foundation for computer 
modelling of evolution, development, and learning, especially as 
regards neural systems.  I would greatly appreciate notices (and 
reprints) of any of your work related to these matters.  Note, though, 
that the papers must relate to actual biological systems, which can 
THEN be approached by ALife techniques. 
     Send any information/queries to: 

     David G. Stork 
     Psychology 
     Jordan Hall 
     Stanford University 
     Stanford, CA 94305 USA 
     Stork@psych.Stanford.edu 
     415-493-0930 

     Thanks. 

------------------------------ 
  
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 90 10:34:24 EST 
From: danny@think.com (Danny Hillis) 
Subject: Artificial Life Digest, #4 

   I read an interesting article in a swedish computer magazine. It claimed 
   that Nasa is investigating the possiblity of so called 'information-agents'.  
   That is some kind of virus-alike program that should cruise the Internet 
   in search of some specific information. 

This sounds very much like Bob Kahn's concept of "Knowbots" 
-danny 

------------------------------ 
  
Subject: Re: Artificial Life Digest, #4  
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 90 11:56:54 EST 
From: Manoel Fernando Tenorio <tenorio@ee.ecn.purdue.edu> 

-------- 
RE: agents 
  
I have done a fair amount of work in the subject since 1985 with Dr. Les 
Gasser at USC. There, a new language MACE (lisp based, Multiple agent 
computing environment) was designed, and work on modeling all sorts of things 
proceeds at full speed. Here, at Purdue, in 1987, I started the design of the 
second generation kind of multitread agent based language called CoHoRT  
(Concurrent 
Hypermedia Reasoning Tool). It is a Unix and C Based language that accepts 
C programming, prewritten (well behave) C code, and rules to be used in the 
programming of the agents. It relies on vanilla Unix, and has been ported 
to a number of platforms. 
  
Each agent has a communication box, and a body containing its behaviors and 
functions. It can learn new behaviors and functions, append new code to 
its body automatically, spawn new agents, kill them, etc. Each agent is 
an independent Unix process and can easy work across manchines even on a 
multivendor network. 
  
The reason to create such a language (MACE) was to model dist. AI kinds of 
processes. CoHoRT was created to fuse simulation, hypermedia and AI. 
  
If everything works well, by the end of the Summer, a new commercial version 
of this language will be released and supported. If you are interested send 
me mail with address and email contacts, and I'll pass the information to 
the right parties. 
  
--Tenorio 

 
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