This chapter looks at how a hearer or reader can understand metaphorical discourse, particularly when it is creative. The abilities of the ATT-Meta approach to creative metaphor understanding, implemented in an AI reasoning system, are discussed. A natural extension to metaphor generation is also briefly mentioned. As regards types of creativity, the chapter focusses on how ATT-Meta deals with ...

Pfeiffer contains a population of fractals which has been evolving continuously for more than three years. The animations are developed from embryos using a Lindenmayer grammar (LSystem). These open generative representations potentially allow gene duplication and the evolution of higher order genetic operators and might be a step towards the emergence of social intelligence in swarms of artifi...

A central goal of the field of artificial life is to build evolving systems that capture interesting dynamics of natural systems, producing evolutionary outcomes such as sophisticated navigation behaviors, novel cooperative strategies, complex ecosystems, or major evolutionary transitions, to name but a few. Such “open-ended” systems are sought after for a number of reasons: 1) For artificial l...

In this contribution we will review different conceptions of open-ended evolution and propose our own (RuizMirazo et al., 2008, Biol. & Philos., 23, p.67). Then, we will consider what are the general conditions that would allow such an evolutionary process to take place, with a specific focus on the type of organization that the systems involved should have. It will be argued that a strong ‘dyn...

We report progress on adding affect-detection to a program for virtual dramatic improvisation, monitored by a human director. We have developed an affect-detection module to control an automated virtual actor and to contribute to the automation of directorial functions. The work also involves basic research into how affect is conveyed through metaphor. The relevance of the project to the sympos...

Open-ended activities such as CAD/CAM, VLSI layout and software development require consistent concurrent access and fault tolerance associated with database transactions, but their uncertain duration, uncertain developments during execution and long interactions with other concurrent activities break traditional transaction atomicity boundaries. We propose splittransaction as a new database op...

An important difficulty in developing spoken dialogue systems for robots is the open-ended nature of most interactions. Robotic agents must typically operate in complex, continuously changing environments which are difficult to model and do not provide any clear, predefined goal. Directly capturing this complexity in a single, large dialogue policy is thus inadequate. This paper presents a new ...