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The following technical report is available:

                       Synthetic Ethology:
            An Approach to the Study of Communication

                         Bruce MacLennan
                   Computer Science Department
                     University of Tennessee
                    Knoxville, TN 37996-1301
             internet address:  maclennan at cs.utk.edu

                            CS-90-104

A complete understanding of communication, language, intentional-
ity and related mental phenomena will require a theory integrat-
ing mechanistic explanations with ethological phenomena.  For the
foreseeable future, the complexities of natural life in its
natural environment will preclude such an understanding.  An
approach more conducive to carefully controlled experiments and
to the discovery of deep laws of great generality is to study
synthetic life forms in a synthetic world to which they have
become coupled through evolution.  This is the approach of _syn-
thetic ethology_.  Some simple experiments in synthetic ethology
are described, in which we have observed the evolution of commun-
ication in a population of simple machines. We show that even in
these simple worlds communication manifests some of the richness
and complexity found in natural communication. Finally  some
future directions for research in synthetic ethology are dis-
cussed, as well as some issues relevant to both synthetic ethol-
ogy and artificial life.

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