ALife IV Conference Report

The following two talks by Demetri Terzopoulos et al, and Karl Sims were the highlights of the conference in my book. Both effectively built (simulated) artificial organisms. Terzopoulos et al simulated artificial fish using springs and differential equantions to provide the fish with lifelike motions. The scope of their work can be seen from the section titles in their paper, e.g. physics-based fish model and locomotion, mechanics, swimming using muscles and hydrodynamics, motor controllers, pectoral fins, learning muscle based locomotion, learning strategy, low level learning, abstraction of high level controllers, sensory perception, vision sensor, behavioral modeling, habits and mental state, intention generator, behavior routines, artificial fish types, predators, pacifists. It was an extraordinary piece of work and will probably be highly influential in the next year or so.

Karl Sims paper combined his genius at computer graphics with some solid research ability. He evolved 3D rectangloid shaped "creatures" AND their neural network controllers and had these creatures fight it out in pairs in a co-evolutionary competition to get as close as possible to a target cube. I had the eery feeling watching the video of these creatures that I was witnessing the birth of a new field, namely "brain building", where the focus is on constructing increasingly elaborate artificial nervous systems. I will say more about this later.

The remaining talks of the first morning were by Dave Ackley (on "Altruism in the Evolution of Communication"), Hiroaki Kitano (on "Evolution of Metabolism for Morphogenesis" - which made a solid contribution to the nascient field of artificial embryology), and Craig Reynolds (of "Boid" fame) (on "Competition, Coevolution and the Game of Tag", a coevolution of an alternating cat and mouse game).

In the afternoon of the 6th, in a plenary talk, my boss Shimohara, spoke of ALife work at our Evolutionary Systems Department at ATR labs, Kyoto, Japan. (By the way, the next conference, i.e. ALife V, 1996, will be organized by Chris Langton, with local assistance from Shimohara san, and will probably be held in Kyoto or Nara, Japan's favorite tourist cities), around mid May. He introduced the researchers and the work of his group, e.g. software evolution (Tom Ray's "Tierra" and its multicell extension), my "CAM-Brain" (which hopes to evolve billion neuron brains at electronic speeds inside cellular automata machines, Hemmi and Mizoguchi's "Evolvable Hardware", (which uses Koza's Genetic Programming to evolve tree structured HDLs (hardware description languages) to evolve electronic circuit descriptions), and other members of our group. He then briefly showed how extensive ALife research has become in Japan. Shimohara stunned his audience by stating that the long term aim of the group, i.e. by the year 2001, is to build an artificial brain. A string of people came up to me after his talk with the comment "Is he serious?" "Yep", I said.

After that, the conference split into dual sessions, so I missed half the talks. To get an overview of the best talks in the dual sessions I asked some of the organizers and "senior attendants" whom they felt gave the best or the most interesting or promising talks. As usual, in these ALife reports of mine, there is a strong dose of subjective judgement and bias. Some highlights were :-

Jeffrey Kephart's "A Biologically Inspired Immune System for Computers", introduced the notion of "computer immune systems" to counter computer viruses. He is from IBM, so he was woolly on details, but he said that the millions of dollars spent on viral protection made a computer immune system essential. He also stated that a running system would be ready at IBM within a year. Such a system could be the first multimillion dollar ALife based application.

Hosokawa et al's talk "Dynamics of Self Assembling Systems - Analogy with Chemical Kinetics", I did not see at the conference, but had seen already at a seminar they presented at ATR. They shake cardboard triangles with internal magnets so that they self assemble into multicelled systems. They then analyse the probabilities of forming various self assembling shapes.

Beckers et al's talk "From Local Actions to Global Tasks : Stigmergy and Collective Robotics" I did not see either. It took a foraging behavioral principle of termites (stigmergy) and applied it to minirobots.

Nolfi et al's "How to Evolve Autonomous Robots : Different Approaches in Evolutionary Robotics" discussed the rival approaches to evolving neural controllers for robots, i.e. simulation or real world fitness measurements. (i.e. fast and simple, vs. slow and complex). A good overview paper of a complex and important issue.

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The other plenary talks were :-

Jill Tarter and Paul Horowitz on "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence". This promised to be a fun talk, but Tarter is too nuts-and-bolts a personality and was too preoccupied by a recent funding cut to relate well to her audience. Horowitz was more fun, with a definite sense of humor matching his competence. However, what was lacking was a link between SETI and ALife. These two speakers were simply parachuted in from outside, without instructions to connect SETI to ALife. An opportunity for synergy between SETI and ALife was missed. Questions such as "what types of life should SETI expect to find, would their biochemistry necessarily be similar to ours, etc", were not even addressed. Pity.

Jack Szostak spoke on "Towards the In Vitro Evolution of an RNA Replicase". This talk I found rivetting. I believe that the blossoming field of molecular evolution is the hottest and most significant branch of ALife around today. It will revolutionize the fields of genetic engineering, the drug industry, and may even play a role in the long term construction of artificial cells. This field is about GAs applied to real molecules, evolving them in a cycle of test, select, amplify. Nobels will flow from this field. Already recognition of Gerald Joyce's pioneering work in this field has come in the form of prizes. Stay tuned.

Tom Ray paced up and down the stage introducing his concept of "A Proposal to Create a Network-Wide Biodiversity Reserve for Digitial Organisms", i.e. putting Tierra on thousands of computers on the Internet. Tom wowed his audience with statements like ".. the digital organisms will migrate around the globe on a daily basis, staying on the dark side of the planet, because they will have discovered that there is more CPU time available at night, while users sleep". Ray dreams of "digital farming", i.e. tapping spontaneously evolved digital organisms and using them for useful purposes. He prefers spontaneous evolution to directed evolution ("autonomism" vs. "directivism").

Stefan Helmreich, an anthropologist, reported on his studies of ALifers and their work. Chris Langton introduced him saying that he (i.e. Chris) felt like a bug being examined by Helmreich. I had a rather antsy feeling listening to him, because he sounded rather like a psycho-analyst or a theologian, in the sense of not feeling compelled to put his conjectures to the test. It was most edifying to learn that most ALifers are upper middle class, straight, atheist WASPs, etc. The talk had a definite ideological axe-to-grind edge to it. He also read his speech, a real no-no in computer land, and spoke at machine gun pace, totally losing his non native English speaker audience. While the bullets were flying, I couldnt help thinking that surveys had shown that on average the theoretical physicists and mathematicians are the smartest groups at universities, and the anthropologists are the dumbest. Helmreich was certainly not dumb, but some of his assertions sure were antsy.

The afternoon of the second day was taken up with posters and tours of MIT's Media Lab and the AI Lab. I went to the AI Lab and snapped lots of photos of the team members of "COG", Brook's latest attempt at AI. It was production line research, with a PERT chart over 3 years with more than 30 arrows, each arrow being a PhD or masters thesis. I met over a dozen young researchers working on COG, an upper torso robot with vision, hearing, hand and finger control and hopefully COGnitive abilities. This is a very ambitious project. Brooks will need all the luck he can get. At a recent Tokyo workshop, Brooks said that he launched COG, because he felt he had only one 10 year project left in him, and he wanted to have a shot at making an AI human rather than some artificial cockroach or something equally unsexy. Good luck Rod, and a long life!

The morning of the third day, Luc Steels gave a plenary talk on "Emergent functionality of robot behavior through on-line evolution". Unfortunately, I skipped the third day, to meet another engagement, so I cant give an opinion.

General Comments

To those researchers in the field of evolutionary computation, I think you can congratulate yourselves. EC played a significant, if not dominant role at ALife IV. Chris Langton stated in his editorial of the first issue of the new MIT Press journal "Artificial Life" that he did not want to see any more "YANNs" (i.e. yet another (evolved) neural net). This shows how powerful a tool EC has become. A journalist writing on evolvable hardware in the magazine "The Economist" in 1993, described evolution as the computational theme of the 90s. It looks that way more and more.

I asked over a dozen people what they thought of the conference in general. An assortment of comments were :-

The field of ALife has matured.

The mathematicians are starting to move in, time to move out.

There was little new, just more of the same.

A good solid conference, solid work, respectable.

Boring, all the fringey stuff was weeded out.

I must say, that the last comment hit home for me. ALife IV felt like "just another conference", to me, whereas ALife III had real zing. Apart from a few papers on evolvable hardware, a paper on computer immunity, and a few others, there was little I could describe as being qualitatively new. It looks as though the field has matured, as evidenced by the fact that there is now an MIT Press ALife journal, and that 500 or so people turned up to ALife IV.

Chris Langton's three ALife conferences were characterised by a mix of creative fun and solid competence. I felt the ALife IV conference lacked the fun element. This can be dangerous because the "creative-crazies" who pioneer a field are a fickle lot, and can very easily move on to the next hot topic. I remember a conversation with Chris Langton, wondering what the next hot topic will be. We didnt know. Well, now I think I know what it will be. I had premonitions of it listening to Terzopolous's and Sims's talks. My feeling is that enough people are now playing around with building artificial nervous systems, (e.g. the "3 musketeers" at Sussex, UK; Beer and Arbib in the US; our group at ATR, Japan; Nolfi et al in Italy; etc) that the time is ripe for the birth of a new field, which I call simply "Brain Building". I'm sticking my neck out here, but I feel fairly confident this will happen. I'm predicting that the field of ALife will give birth to this new field. I'm curious to see how other people feel about this prediction.

ALife V in Japan (probably Kyoto or Nara), 1996.

Finally, if you have been promising yourself a trip to Japan before you get too old, here is your chance. ALife V, will be held in 1996 in Japan, probably in May, in Kyoto or Nara, Japan's favorite tourist cities, with "a temple on every corner". Maybe you can combine the conference with a week or two of touristing. I live here and I still havent exhausted what there is to see.

If I'm not too busy talking with my million neuron brain in 1996, see you there (i.e. here).

MIT Press will publish the oral papers in a book due out within a matter of weeks I'm told.

Cheers,
         Hugo de Garis
Dr. Hugo de Garis,
Brain Builder Group,
Evolutionary Systems Department,
ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratories,
2-2 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto-fu,
Kansai Science City, 619-02, Japan.
tel. + 81 7749 5 1079, fax. + 81 7749 5 1008, email.  degaris@hip.atr.co.jp