Related papers: The Ecosystem Path to General AI
Language carries thought and coordination among humans but rarely reaches further along the spectrum of diverse intelligence. Yet non-neural systems -- from gene regulatory networks and microbial consortia to fungi -- are increasingly…
The reward system is one of the fundamental drivers of animal behaviors and is critical for survival and reproduction. Despite its importance, the problem of how the reward system has evolved is underexplored. In this paper, we try to…
Resilient ecological systems will be better able to maintain their structure and function in the emerging Anthropocene. Estimating the resilience of different systems will therefore provide valuable insight for conservation decision-makers,…
Environmental changes play a critical role in determining the evolution of social dilemmas in many natural or social systems. Generally, the environmental changes include two prominent aspects: the global time-dependent fluctuations and the…
Life on earth depends on healthy oceans, which supply a large percentage of the planet's oxygen, food, and energy. However, the oceans are under threat from climate change, which is devastating the marine ecosystem and the economic and…
Evolutionary and ecosystem dynamics are often treated as different processes --operating at separate timescales-- even if evidence reveals that rapid evolutionary changes can feed back into ecological interactions. A recent long-term field…
A robotic swarm that is required to operate for long periods in a potentially unknown environment can use both evolution and individual learning methods in order to adapt. However, the role played by the environment in influencing the…
"Benefit Game: Alien Seaweed Swarms" combines artificial life art and interactive game with installation to explore the impact of human activity on fragile seaweed ecosystems. The project aims to promote ecological consciousness by creating…
We integrate dual-process theories of human cognition with evolutionary game theory to study the evolution of automatic and controlled decision-making processes. We introduce a model where agents who make decisions using either automatic or…
Exploring the climate impacts of various anthropogenic emissions scenarios is key to making informed decisions for climate change mitigation and adaptation. State-of-the-art Earth system models can provide detailed insight into these…
Human cognition is profoundly shaped by the environments in which it unfolds. Yet, it remains an open question whether learning and decision making can be explained as a principled adaptation to the statistical structure of real-world…
The proliferation of machine learning and artificial intelligence redefines the interaction between the anthropogenic and natural elements of our habitat.The use of monitoring tools, processing facilities and the internet of things supports…
Agent-based models typically treat systems in isolation, discarding environmental coupling as either computationally prohibitive or dynamically irrelevant. We demonstrate that this neglect misses essential physics: environmental degrees of…
A new approach to understanding evolution [Val09], namely viewing it through the lens of computation, has already started yielding new insights, e.g., natural selection under sexual reproduction can be interpreted as the Multiplicative…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
Modern ecology has re-emphasized the need for a quantitative understanding of the original 'survival of the fittest theme' based on analyzis of the intricate trade-offs between competing evolutionary strategies that characterize the…
The origin of agriculture represents a major evolutionary transition and a paradigmatic example of how complex collective behaviors emerge from simple interactions. Here we introduce an artificial society of reinforcement learning agents…
Ecology and evolution are inherently linked, and studying a mathematical model that considers both holds promise of insightful discoveries related to the dynamics of cooperation. In the present article, we use the prisoner's dilemma (PD)…
The Animal-AI Environment is a unique game-based research platform designed to facilitate collaboration between the artificial intelligence and comparative cognition research communities. In this paper, we present the latest version of the…
To traverse complex three-dimensional terrainwith large obstacles, animals and robots must transition across different modes. However, the most mechanistic understanding of terrestrial locomotion concerns how to generate and stabilize…