Entries for June 2006
Marratech
Earlier today, I had my first experience using proper web conferencing software. In the past, I used to phone in to lab meetings, but that had various drawbacks and limitations, and I was much more impressed with the solution we used today.
Marratech makes teleconferencing software, and they offer a somewhat restricted free client. The client is unable to handle more than 5 concurrent connections (not an issue for my use), and restricted to only using public 'rooms' on their servers, which could potentially be an issue but so far the people I know who use this haven't had any issues with strangers intruding. Here's what the service offers:
Home cluster finally working
A couple of months ago I decided that one of the approaches I should take to the open-ended CPU requirements of my experiments was to build my own cluster.
Continue reading "Home cluster finally working"
Next steps
Prior to ALife I was drifting a little, having spent too long figuring out what experiments I should be doing. The conference helped with motivation, and talking to various people—particularly Eduardo Izquierdo-Torres (whose research focus is very close to mine, and is a visitor to my lab for the summer)—helped me re-focus. I've decided that what I need to do is run more experiments for two of my existing setups, and set up two modifications that make the conditions more continuous.
Overall, I'm looking at two specific questions. The first is whether I can evolve generalist time-sensitive agents, or (as I suspect) will keep getting stuck with specialists that are tuned to some subset of the possible timescales they could be exposed to. The second (and more interesting, I think) question is under what conditions the ability to learn and re-learn a stimulus-response association can evolve. I'll go into a bit more detail below:
Alan Kamil - Natural History and Cognition
There were quite a few seminars in the past few months that I didn't get around to writing summaries of. I probably won't for most of them—plenty of talks, while very interesting in their own right, are far enough from my research interests that I can't really justify taking an hour or two off other work to write them up—but there was one in particular that I do want to revisit because the work presented ties in interestingly with my own.
Alan Kamil of the University of Nebraska Center for Avian Cognition gave a talk at the UW titled Natural History and Cognition. Kamil presented his whole research career as a chronological overview, but rather than summarise the whole thing I'll just focus on two particularly relevant issues behind the cut:
- The relative adaptive value of a given behavioural strategy
- The impact of environmental niche on cognitive ability and specialisation
Continue reading "Alan Kamil - Natural History and Cognition"
Facelift
I've finally got around to designing my own templates for this site, instead of just tinkering mildly with the supplied one. I'm fairly pleased with how it looks, but of course that doesn't guarantee that anyone else will be, or that it will look good on someone else's computer. So if anything looks weird, or [especially] is hard to read, please let me know, and if possible please mention what browser & operating system you're using.
ALife X braindump
Last week I attended ALife X. I spoke to many people, took many notes, and flagged a large number of papers to read. Because of the difficulty of writing a worthwhile summary of a conference like this, what follows behind the cut is a disorganised 'braindump' from my notes. That way at least I'll cognitively process the information a little more, and it's within the realm of possibility that the notes will be of some use to someone else.
Continue reading "ALife X braindump"
Disappointing
Because I found Aspects of Plant Intelligence so interesting and strange (as I wrote about 2 weeks ago), I've been looking up some of the references from it. So far I've found two errors: one probably a typo, one quite significant.
The minor error is that one of the references (ironically, to a paper by the same author) had the wrong date. Minor, but had the author had a more common name I might not have been able to find the paper.
The important error is that one of the cited papers—Volatiles from Different Barley Cultivars Affect Aphid Acceptance of Neighbouring Plants—doesn't say what Trewavas claims it does. I was particularly eager to read this article, because it was purported to be about inter-plant communication—specifically warnings of aphid attack—which is not something I was aware of plants doing. It turns out to have been nothing of the sort: it's about indirect effects on one barley variant of being near another; regardless of any particular stimulus triggering a signal. In fact, none of the 'signalling' plants in the study were under aphid attack.
Most disappointingly of all, this was obvious from reading the abstract, so Trewavas must have either meant to reference a different paper, or not bothered even looking at the abstract, or been outright dishonest. This makes me suspicious of other claims in the citing article, but I neither have the time nor the journal subscriptions to check out every claim, so I'll probably just have to assume this isn't a reliable source.
Plant Intelligence?
Today I read a particularly thought-provoking paper—Aspects of Plant Intelligence
by Anthony Trewavas—arguing that we should recognise plants as exhibiting intelligent behaviour. I'm not convinced, but there are some very thought-provoking things in the paper, so I thought I'd summarise my reactions here and see if anyone else has a response.
The general message of the paper was that while plants don't locomote like animals do, their growth patterns are highly selective and adaptive to their environment, and they do exhibit some temporal behaviours in response to environmental changes (such as the opening and closing of stomata). Trewavas argues that these are just as validly described as intelligent as the animal behaviours we normally describe as such; they just happen on a slower timescale. The paper reviews a wide range of evidence for this argument, some parts of which I found more persuasive than others.