clairday@edsews.EDS.COM (matt clairday) (03/01/90)
I wonder if anyone saw the article two days ago in the Wall Street Journal concerning an AI project at UCLA? The article described the work of David Jefferson, a CS person there. He is working on the idea of "growing" software. quoting now: " At a Santa Fe conference on "artificail life" this month, Mr. Jefferson described the evolution of some "electronic ants" created on a computer, illuminating a program that could offer a new model on writing software." He desinged a simulated environment for these "ants" where they were judged on their "performance" in navigating a simulated trail. Only the best 10% survived during each generation. "After creating 200 generations of ants, Mr. Jefferson had a strain of super ants who follow the trail with ease." This subject is very interesting to me. If anyone has any info on how I might get a copy of this paper, a contact address for Mr. Jefferson, or any info on the New Mexico conference on artificial life, I would very much appriciate it. thanks .
kurt@happy.csg.uiuc.edu (Kurt) (03/02/90)
In article <23107@edsews.EDS.COM> clairday@edsews.EDS.COM (matt clairday) writes: >I wonder if anyone saw the article two days ago in the Wall Street Journal >concerning an AI project at UCLA? The article described the work of >David Jefferson, a CS person there. He is working on the idea of "growing" >software. > >He desinged a simulated environment for these "ants" where they were judged >on their "performance" in navigating a simulated trail. Only the best 10% >survived during each generation. "After creating 200 generations of ants, >Mr. Jefferson had a strain of super ants who follow the trail with ease." The problem with this work is that the ants only learned how to solve the traversal of a specific path. If they were given a different path with the same sort of characteristics, they were not able to traverse it. Also, learning one path did not help in subsequent learning of other paths. If I remember his talk correctly, learning one path actually hinderend learning other paths. It appears that much more work must be done so that the techniques he presented are applicable to multiple instances of the same sort of problem. kurt ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Kurt Thearling 1101 W. Springfield Avenue University of Illinois Urbana, Il 61801 Coordinated Science Lab kurt@bach.csg.uiuc.edu -----------------------------------------------------------------------
dmn@stiatl.UUCP (Michael Nowacki) (03/02/90)
In <1990Mar1.212630.20380@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> kurt@happy.csg.uiuc.edu writes: >In <23107@edsews.EDS.COM> clairday@edsews.EDS.COM (matt clairday) writes: >>concerning an AI project at UCLA? >> "After creating 200 generations of ants, >>Mr. Jefferson had a strain of super ants who follow the trail with ease." > > >The problem with this work is that the ants only learned how to solve the >traversal of a specific path. i recall reading about experiments that indicated that learned behavior could be inherited (in rats, anyway) years ago. so maybe we inherit our parent's habits. no shit. certainly their BAD habits are almost inevitably ours. the UCLA experiment could be said to indicate that one of our problems is that we inherit habits, and this is an obstacle to manifesting intelligence. or maybe its just habits in general. as roz chast would say, "who knows?" -- Michael Nowacki gatech!stiatl!dmn Sales Technologies, Inc |\ /| 3399 Peachtree Rd, NE | \/ | Atlanta, GA (404) 841-4000 _|ike |_