%0 Journal Article %J Artificial Life %D 2018 %T ALife and Society: Editorial Introduction to the Artificial Life Conference 2016 Special Issue %A Siqueiros-García, Jesús M. %A Froese, Tom %A Gershenson, Carlos %A Aguilar, Wendy %A Sayama, Hiroki %A Izquierdo, Eduardo %B Artificial Life %I MIT Press %V 24 %P 1–4 %@ 1064-5462 %G eng %U https://doi.org/10.1162/ARTL_e_00256 %R 10.1162/ARTL_e_00256 %0 Journal Article %J PLoS ONE %D 2014 %T Can Government Be Self-Organized? A Mathematical Model of the Collective Social Organization of Ancient {Teotihuacan}, Central {Mexico} %A Froese, Tom %A Gershenson, Carlos %A Manzanilla, Linda R. %X

Teotihuacan was the first urban civilization of Mesoamerica and one of the largest of the ancient world. Following a tradition in archaeology to equate social complexity with centralized hierarchy, it is widely believed that the city's origin and growth was controlled by a lineage of powerful individuals. However, much data is indicative of a government of co-rulers, and artistic traditions expressed an egalitarian ideology. Yet this alternative keeps being marginalized because the problems of collective action make it difficult to conceive how such a coalition could have functioned in principle. We therefore devised a mathematical model of the city's hypothetical network of representatives as a formal proof of concept that widespread cooperation was realizable in a fully distributed manner. In the model, decisions become self-organized into globally optimal configurations even though local representatives behave and modify their relations in a rational and selfish manner. This self-optimization crucially depends on occasional communal interruptions of normal activity, and it is impeded when sections of the network are too independent. We relate these insights to theories about community-wide rituals at Teotihuacan and the city's eventual disintegration.

%B PLoS ONE %I Public Library of Science %V 9 %P e109966 %8 10 %G eng %U http://dx.doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0109966 %R 10.1371/journal.pone.0109966 %0 Journal Article %J Frontiers in Robotics and AI %D 2014 %T The Past, Present, and Future of Artificial Life %A Aguilar, Wendy %A Santamaría Bonfil, Guillermo %A Froese, Tom %A Gershenson, Carlos %X

For millennia people have wondered what makes the living different from the non-living. Beginning in the mid-1980s, artificial life has studied living systems using a synthetic approach: build life in order to understand it better, be it by means of software, hardware, or wetware. This review provides a summary of the advances that led to the development of artificial life, its current research topics, and open problems and opportunities. We classify artificial life research into fourteen themes: origins of life, autonomy, self-organization, adaptation (including evolution, development, and learning), ecology, artificial societies, behavior, computational biology, artificial chemistries, information, living technology, art, and philosophy. Being interdisciplinary, artificial life seems to be losing its boundaries and merging with other fields.

%B Frontiers in Robotics and AI %V 1 %G eng %U http://www.frontiersin.org/computational_intelligence/10.3389/frobt.2014.00008/abstract %R 10.3389/frobt.2014.00008