Artificial Life and the Animat Approach to Artificial Intelligence

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the topic of artificial life (AL), with emphasis on animats. AL is a novel scientific pursuit that aims at studying manmade systems exhibiting behaviors that are characteristic of natural living systems. AL complements the traditional biological sciences concerned with the analysis of living organisms by attempting to synthesize life-like behaviors within computers or other artificial media. One particularly active area of artificial life is concerned with the conception and construction of artificial animals simulated by computers or by actual robots whose rules of behavior are inspired by those of animals. These simulations are known as Animats. Research in the field of standard artificial intelligence (AI) aims at simulating the most elaborate faculties of the human brain such as problem solving, natural language understanding, and logical reasoning. With the aim of explaining how peculiar human faculties might be inherited from the simplest adaptive abilities of animals, the animat approach is based on the conception or construction of simulated animals or robots capable of surviving in more or less unpredictable and threatening environments. The animat approach places emphasis on the characteristics neglected by standard AI. This approach is interested explicitly in the interactions between an animat and its environment and particularly stresses the aptitude of the animat to survive in unexpected environmental circumstances. Centered on the study of grounded and robust behaviors, research on the adaptive behavior of animats avoids the pitfalls of standard AI, improves our knowledge in those domains where standard AI has failed notoriously, and notably addresses the problems of perception, categorization, and sensorimotor control.

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