David Fogel Gives Plenary Lecture at First Australian Conference on Artificial Life

Canberra, Austrailia - Dr. David Fogel, CEO of Natural Selection, Inc.^®, gave a plenary address to the attendees of the First Australian Conference on Artificial Life (ACAL 2003) on the campus of the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) in Canberra, Australia. The conference was organized by Prof. Hussein Abbass of ADFA and Prof. Janet Wiles of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Dr. Fogel’s lecture was titled “Challenges and Successes in Evolutionary Agent-Based Models.” He addressed the successful evolution of Blondie24, the well-known evolutionary checkers playing program, as well as the challenges posed in modeling complex systems with adaptive agents. “It was a great opportunity to bring together past research in agent-based modeling and present the results to a focused audience such as this,” said Dr. Fogel. He reported on his research involving the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, evolutionary stable strategies, and minority games in which experiments with evolutionary agents have generated apparently unpredicted results. “For example, in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, when models were extended to a continuous range of options, we saw cases where agents evolved not toward cooperation but rather in the other direction toward defection,” said Dr. Fogel, adding “the take-home message is to always question the assumptions in models of the real world and experiment to determine what effects those assumptions imply.”

The conference attracted an international audience, with other plenary talks given by Prof. Stefano Nolfi of Italy on evolutionary robotics, Prof. Mark Ragan of Australia on bioinformatics and phylogenetic trees, and Prof. David Green of Australia on models of complex systems at varying levels of hierarchy. The second conference in the series will be held in 2005 in Sydney, Australia.