Alife Digest Number 036

Published in

· 11 months ago

ALIFE LIST: Artificial Life Research List Number 36  Friday, August 31st 1990 

             ARTIFICIAL LIFE RESEARCH ELECTRONIC MAILING LIST 
    Maintained by the Indiana University Artificial Life Research Group 

Contents: 

                                Essence of A-Life 
                             Polyandry and Survival 

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Date: Wed, 29 Aug 90 12:46:52 PDT 
From: abbott@aerospace.aero.org (Russell J. Abbott) 
Subject: Essence of A-Life 

After watching this field with great interest for a while, I have 
started to wonder whether a useful attempt has been made to identify the 
essental elements of a-life systems.  For the sake of discussion, here 
is my list. 

1.  Entities in an environment. 

2.  Advantages to finding optimizations within that environment. 

3.  Mechanisms for generating, storing, and using information (about 
those optimizations). 

I realize that this is pretty gross: what do "entities," "environment," 
and "advantage" mean.  What does it mean for an entity to be in an 
environment?  (At least "optimization" and "information" are somewhat 
better understood.)  But it is a start. 

How would you modify this list?  Or, if this is not a good list to start 
with, is there a better one? 

I have intentionally left out reproduction (even though the term A-Life 
suggests that it should be included) because I am not sure how relevant 
that is.  One can argue that what is really reproduced in successful 
a-life systems is information.  But once one has a way of producing and 
using information, reproducing it is comparatively simple.  What is 
really important about information is the existence of an interpretive 
system for using it, and that is included in my (3) above. 

-- Russ Abbott@itro3.aero.org 

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Date: Thu, 30 Aug 90 03:43 PDT 
From: sds@jazzie.wa.com (Sean Shapira) 
Subject: Polyandry and Survival 

Marek W. Lugowski <marek@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> wrote: 
> My first question is to ask for any information that any of you may 
> have on polyandry in Nepal.  [...]  I am also interested in the economics  
> of polyandry, [and] in possibly modeling such emergences  

In Nepal, aren't the husbands brothers?  Isn't a probablistic argument, 
based on the husbands' shared genetic traits combined with the "right" life  
expectancies for adult males and fatherless children, sufficient to show 
that polyandry may be a survival trait in some circumstances? 

						--Sean Shapira 

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End of ALife Digest 
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