Entries in "roadmap"
June 21, 2006
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: