Foundational controversies in artificial life and artificial intelligence arise from lack of decidable criteria for defining the epistemic cuts that separate knowledge of reality from reality itself, e.g., description from construction, simulation from realization, mind from brain. Selective evolution began with a description-construction cut, i.e., the genetically coded synthesis of proteins. ...

Blood vessel growth is a fascinating example of an adaptive, morphologically plastic network formation process driven by complex interactions between individual cells in the vessel and between the cells and their dynamic extracellular environment. Under normal conditions this can generate a well-adapted hierarchical branching structure. However in tumours, blood vessels become maladapted, leaky...

In this work, a method to enhance images based on a new artificial life model is presented. The model is inspired on the behaviour of a herbivore organism, when this organism is in a certain environment and selects its food. This organism travels through the image iteratively, selecting the more suitable food and eating parts of it in each iteration. The path that the organism travels through i...

I review our recent work on human simulation, specifically:(1) an artificial life framework that addresses the problem of emulating the rich complexity of human appearance and activity in urban environments, resulting in autonomous pedestrian models, and (2) a comprehensive biomechanical model of the human body that confronts the combined challenge of modeling and controlling more or less all o...

In this thesis, a method incorporating artificial life and genetic algorithms into a hybrid system for problem solving is presented. An ecosystem is created containing agents that live off rewriting solutions to problems. If an agent rewrites a solution so that it becomes a better solution, the agent gains some energy. This amount of energy is proportional to the improvement of the solution. Th...

The following work outlines a semiotic approach to the construction of musical codes, which reproduce the complexity of the configurations created by cellular automata. Many types of musical codes (i.e. binary, color, local, global and mixed) are analysed, from the simplest to the most complex. In our opinion musical codes are a method of reading complexity and discovering emergence. This proce...

Different topologies for the life space of an artificial life environment facing continuous optimization problems are explored. Starting from a lattice we tested the efficiency of the algorithm when the physical space in which the agents evolve is represented first by a higher degree lattice, then by a small world network, next by a random graph and last by a scale-free network. Interesting res...

Adaptation and real time behavior becomes a necessity for agents that want to survive in Artificial Life environments. Agents are autonomous and therefore some form of unsupervised learning has to be used to improve and adapt their behavior in time. The neurodynamic reinforcement learning approach – Q-learning where Q-factors are represented using neural networks, overcomes problems of the clas...

I argue that the characterisation of reducibility as computability is too weak to be credible. I propose an improved version “intentional computability” and show that it is indeed a stronger criteria, in that there may be specifications for which there exist programs but where there is no systematic way to build such a program from the specification. This undermines the assumption that just bec...