From Animals to Animats 3

Book excerpt: August 8-12, 1994, Brighton, England From Animals to Animats 3 brings together research intended to advance the fron tier of an exciting new approach to understanding intelligence. The contributors represent a broad range of interests from artificial intelligence and robotics to ethology and the neurosciences. Unifying these approaches is the notion of "animat" -- an artificial animal, either simulated by a computer or embodied in a robot, which must survive and adapt in progressively more challenging environments. The 58 contributions focus particularly on well-defined models, computer simulations, and built robots in order to help characterize and compare various principles and architectures capable of inducing adaptive behavior in real or artificial animals. Topics include: - Individual and collective behavior. - Neural correlates of behavior. - Perception and motor control. - Motivation and emotion. - Action selection and behavioral sequences. - Ontogeny, learning, and evolution. - Internal world models and cognitive processes. - Applied adaptive behavior. - Autonomous robots. - Heirarchical and parallel organizations. - Emergent structures and behaviors. - Problem solving and planning. - Goal-directed behavior. - Neural networks and evolutionary computation. - Characterization of environments. A Bradford Book