ALife IV Conference Report, Hugo de Garis, ATR

[Hugo de Garis]

                  ALife IV Conference Report, Hugo de Garis, ATR

The 4th Artificial Life conference was held at MIT in Boston, Massachusetts, 
USA, July 6th to 8th, 1994, organised by Rod Brooks and Pattie Maes. About 500 
people turned up, to hear roughly 60 talks spread over plenaries and dual split
sessions. There were over 50 posters. A book containing only the oral talks 
will be published within a few weeks by MIT Press. The best talks were set for
the morning of the 6th. The kickoff speech was by (of course) Chris Langton,
father of and labeller of the field "Artificial Life". Chris spoke of the dream
of ALife to build artificial biologies, so that the universal properties of
all forms of life whether biological or artificial can be understood. He
emphasized the role of evolution much more strongly than he did at the previous
conference at Santa Fe in 1992. In an hour long talk he systematically covered
the steps in ALife research towards greater autonomy in the evolutionary process
of production and selection, ranging over the work of Dawkins, Hillis, Lindgren,
to Ray's fully autonomous "Tierra". I was struck at this apparent "about face"
of Chris's attitude towards the importance and relevance of evolutionary
approaches to ALife. I remember him saying to me at the 1992 conference that
he was rather bored by GAs. Chris talked about his concept of "collectionism"
or micro-macro dynamics, which is both top-down and bottom-up, where the 
macro behavior emerges in a bottom up way from the micro local rules of simple 
agents, yet the macro emergent effects feed back in a top-down way on the 
behavior of the agents. He spoke of biological hierarchies, from prokaryotes
to eukaryotes to multicells to societies. He said the future of life is in
humanity's hands. It was an inspiring and fun talk, even if it did run over
time, thus testing the patience of Rod who was session chair. (Every 5 minutes
over time, Rod would advance a bit, to Chris's "Uh oh!").

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.

etc

etc

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 at hip.atr.co.jp