creators_name: Loula, Angelo
creators_name: Gudwin, Ricardo
creators_name: El-Hani, Charbel
creators_name: Queiroz, João
type: journalp
datestamp: 2009-01-21 22:42:36
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:57:18
metadata_visibility: show
title: Emergence of Self-Organized Symbol-Based Communication  
in Artificial Creatures 
ispublished: inpress
subjects: comp-sci-lang
subjects: comp-sci-complex-theory
subjects: comp-sci-art-intel
full_text_status: public
keywords: emergence, symbol, semiotics, communication, self-organization
abstract:  In this paper, we describe a digital scenario where we simulated the emergence of  self-organized  symbol-based  communication  among  artificial  creatures  inhabiting  a 
virtual  world  of  unpredictable  predatory  events.  In  our  experiment,  creatures  are autonomous  agents  that  learn  symbolic  relations  in  an  unsupervised  manner,  with  no explicit feedback, and are able to engage in dynamical and autonomous communicative interactions with other creatures, even simultaneously. In order to synthesize a behavioral ecology and infer the minimum organizational constraints for the design of our creatures, 
we  examined  the  well-studied  case  of  communication  in  vervet  monkeys.  Our  results show that the creatures, assuming the role of sign users and learners, behave collectively as  a  complex  adaptive  system,  where  self-organized  communicative  interactions  play  a 
major role in the emergence of symbol-based communication. We also strive in this paper for a careful use of the theoretical concepts involved, including the concepts of symbol and emergence, and we make use of a multi-level model for explaining the emergence of symbols in semiotic systems as a basis for the interpretation of inter-level relationships in the semiotic processes we are studying.  
date: 2008
date_type: published
publication: Cognitive Systems Research
refereed: FALSE
referencetext: Bedau, M. (2002). Downward causation and autonomy of weak emergence. Principia 6 (1), 5-50.
Briscoe, T. (1998). Language as a complex adaptive system: Coevolution of language and of the language acquisition device. In Van Halteren, H. et al (Eds). Prooceedings of the 8th Meeting of Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands Conference (pp.3-40), Amsterdam..
Brooks, R.A.(1990). Elephants don't play chess. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6, 3-15.
Cangelosi, A,  & Turner, H. (2002). L'emergere del linguaggio. In Borghi, A. M., & Iachini, T. (Eds.) Scienze della Mente (pp.227-244). Bologna: Il Mulino.
Cangelosi, A. (2001) Evolution of communication and language using signals, symbols, and words. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 5(2), 93-101.
Cangelosi, A., Greco, A., & Harnad, S. (2002). Symbol grounding and the symbolic theft hypothesis. In Cangelosi, A. & Parisi, D. (Eds.), Simulating the Evolution of Language (chap.9). London:Sprinter.
Cariani, P. (1989) On the Design of Devices with Emergent Semantic Functions. Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Systems Science, State University of New York at Binghamton. 
Cariani, P. (1991). Emergence and Artificial Life. In  Langton, C., et al. (Eds.), SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proc. Vol. X, Artificial Life II (pp.775-797). Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley. 
Cheney, D., & Seyfarth, R. (1990) How Monkeys See the World. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Cheney, D., & Seyfarth, R. (1998) Why animals don't have language. In Pearson, G.B. (Ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (pp. 175-209). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Christiansen, M.H., & Kirby, S. (2003). Language evolution: consensus and controversies. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7 (7), 300-307.
Deacon, T. (1997). Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain.  New York: Norton.
Deacon, T. (1999). Memes as signs. The Semiotic Review of Books 10(3): 1-3.
Deacon, T. (2003). Universal grammar and semiotic constraints. In Christiansen, M.H. & Kirby, S. (Eds.), Language Evolution (pp. 111-139). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
El-Hani, C. N. (2002). On the reality of emergents. Principia 6 (1): 51-87.
Emmeche, C. (1996). The Garden in the Machine: The Emerging Science of Artificial Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Emmeche, C. (1997). Defining Life, Explaining Emergence, On-line: http://www.nbi.dk/~emmeche/ (Published in two parts as: Emmeche, C. (1997). Autopoietic Systems, Replicators, and the Search for a Meaningful Biologic Definition of Life. Ultimate Reality and Meaning 20: 244-264; Emmeche, C. (1998). Defining Life as a Semiotic Phenomenon. Cybernetics & Human Knowing 5: 3-17).
Emmeche, C. (2003). Causal Processes, Semiosis, and Consciousness. In Seibt, J. (Ed.) Process Theories: Crossdisciplinary Studies in Dynamic Categories (pp. 313-336). Dordrecht: Kluwer. 
Fetzer, J. H. (1988). Signs and Minds: An Introduction to the Theory of Semiotic Systems. In Fetzer, J.H. (Ed.) Aspects of Artificial Intelligence (pp. 133–161). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Press. 
Fetzer, J. H. (1997) Thinking and Computing: Computers as Special Kinds of Signs. Minds and Machines 7, 345–364.
Franklin, S. (1995). Artificial Minds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Franklin, S. (1997). Autonomous agents as embodied AI. Cybernetics and Systems, 28(6), 499-520.
Griesser, M. & Ekman, J. (2004) Nepotistic alarm calling in the Siberian jay, Perisoreus infaustus. Animal Behaviour, 67(5), 933-939.
Hebb, D.O. (1949) The Organization of Behavior. New York: John Wiley.
Hutchins, E., & Hazlehurst, B. (1995). How to invent a lexicon: the development of shared symbols in interaction. In Gilbert, G. N., & Conte, R. (Eds.) Artificial Societies: The Computer Simulation of Social Life. London: UCL Press.
Jung, D. & Zelinsky, A. (2000). Grounded symbolic communication between heterogeneous cooperating robots. Autonomous Robots journal, 8(3), 269–292.
Keller, R. (1994). On Language Change: the Invisible Hand in Language. London: Routledge.
Loula, A., Gudwin, R. & Queiroz, J. (2004) Symbolic Communication in Artificial Creatures: an experiment in Artificial Life. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 3171, 336 – 345 (Advances in Artificial Intelligence - SBIA 2004, Proceedings of the 17th Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence)
Loula, A., Gudwin, R., Ribeiro, S., Araújo, I. & Queiroz, J. (2004). Synthetic approach to semiotic articial creatures. In Castro, L.N. & Von Zuben, F.J.  (Eds.). Recent Developments in Biologically Inspired Computing (pp. 270-300). Hersey: Idea Group Inc. 
MacLennan, B. J. (2002). Synthetic ethology: a new tool for investigating animal cognition. In Bekoff, M., Allen, C., & Burghardt, G. M. (Eds.) The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition (ch.20, pp.151-156). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
MacLennan. B. J. (2001). The emergence of communication through synthetic evolution. In Patel, M., Honavar, V. & Balakrishnan, K. (Eds.) Advances in the Evolutionary Synthesis of Intelligent Agents (pp. 65-90). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 
Maes, P. (1994) Modeling adaptive autonomous agents. Artificial Life, 1:1-37.
Manser, M. B., Seyfarth, R. M., & Cheney, D. L. (2002) Suricate alarm calls signal predator class and urgency. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6(2), 55-57.
Mataric, M. (1998) Behavior-Based Robotics as a Tool for Synthesis of Artificial Behavior and Analysis of Natural Behavior. Trends in Cognitive Science 2(3), 82-87.
Noble, W., Davidson, I., (1996). Human evolution, language and mind: a psychological and archaeological enquiry. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Oliphant, M. (1999) The learning barrier: Moving from innate to learned systems of communication. Adaptive Behavior, 7(3/4).
Peirce, C.S. (1967)  Annotated catalogue the papers of Charles S. Peirce. Robin, R.S.(Ed.). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 
Peirce, C. S.  (1994 [1866-1913]). The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Eletronic edition --Vols. I-VI (Hartshorne, C. & Weiss, P. (Eds.) Cambridge: Harvard University, 1931-1935], Vols. VII-VIII (Burks, A. W. (Ed.) Cambridge: Harvard University, 1958]. Charlottesville: Intelex Corporation. 
Peirce, Charles S.  (1998 [1893-1913]). The Essential Peirce: selected philosophical writings. Vol. 2. Peirce Edition Project (Ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 
Proctor, C.J., Broom, M., & Ruxtona, G.D. (2001) Modelling antipredator vigilance and flight response in group foragers when warning signals are ambiguous.  Journal of Theoretical Biology, 211(4), 409-417.
Queiroz, J. & El-Hani, C. N. (2006a). Semiosis as an emergent process. Transactions of C.S.Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 42 (1): 78-116.
Queiroz, J. & El-Hani, C. N. (2006b). Towards a multi-level approach to the emergence of meaning processes in living systems. Acta Biotheoretica 54(3): 174-206.
Queiroz, J. & Ribeiro, S. (2002). The biological substrate of icons, indexes, and symbols in animal communication: A neurosemiotic analysis of vervet monkey alarm calls. In Shapiro, M. (Ed.) The Peirce Seminar Papers 5 (pp.69–78). Berghahn Books, New York.
Ransdell, J. (1977). Some leading ideas of Peirce’s Semiotic. Semiotica 19 (3/4), 157–178
Ribeiro, S., Loula, A., Araújo, I., Gudwin, R. and Queiroz, J. (2007) Symbols are not uniquely human. Biosystems 90(1): 263-272.
Ronald, E.M.A., Sipper, M., & Capcarrère, M. S. (1999). Design, observation, surprise! A test of emergence. Artificial Life, 5(3), 225-239,
Roy, D. (2005a). Grounding Words in Perception and Action: Insights from Computational Models. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9 (8): 389-96. 
Roy, D. (2005b). Semiotic Schemas: A Framework for Grounding Language in the Action and Perception. Artificial Intelligence, 167 (1-2): 170-205.
Salthe, S. N. (1985). Evolving Hierarchical Systems: Their Structure and Representation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Seyfarth, R. & Cheney, D. (1986). Vocal development in vervet monkeys. Animal Behaviour, 34: 1640–1658.
Seyfarth, R., Cheney, D., & Marler, P. (1980). Monkey responses to three different alarm calls: Evidence of predator classification and semantic communication. Science, 210, 801–803.
Smith, A. D. M. (2001). Establishing Communication Systems without Explicit Meaning Transmission. In Kelemen, J. & Sosik, P. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL 2001 (pp. 381-390). Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.
Steels, L. (1999). The Talking Heads Experiment: Volume I. Words and Meanings. VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Brussels, Belgium. Special pre-edition.
Steels, L. (2000) Language as a Complex Adaptive System. In Schoenauer, M. (Ed.) Proceedings of Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN) VI. Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag.
Steels, L. (2003). Evolving grounded communication for robots. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(7), 308-312.
Stephan, A. (1998). Varieties of Emergence in Artificial and Natural Systems. Zeitschrift für Naturforschung 53c, 639-656.
Stephan, A. (1999). Emergenz: Von der Unvorhersagbarkeit zur Selbstorganisation. Dresden and München: Dresden University Press.
Sun, R. (2000). Symbol grounding: A new look at an old idea. Philosofical Psychology, 13(2), 149–172.
Vogt, P. (2001) Bootstrapping grounded symbols by minimal autonomous robots. Evolution of Communication, 4(1):87--116.
Vogt, P. (2002). The physical symbol grounding problem. Cognitive Systems Research, 3(3), 429–457.
Vogt, P. (2003). Anchoring of semiotic symbols. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 43(2). 109-120.
Vogt, P. & Coumans, H. (2003) Investigating social interaction strategies for bootstrapping lexicon development. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 6(1).
Wagner, K., Reggia, J. A., Uriagereka, J., & Wilkinson, G. S. (2003) Progress in the simulation of emergent communication and language. Adaptive Behavior, 11(1):37--69.
Werner, G. & Dyer, M. (1992) Evolution of Communication in Artificial Organisms.  In  Langton, C., et al. (Eds.), SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Proc. Vol. X, Artificial Life II (pp.659-687). Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley.
Ziemke, T. (1998). Adaptive Behavior in Autonomous Agents. PRESENCE, 7(6), 564-587.

citation:   Loula, Angelo and Gudwin, Ricardo and El-Hani, Charbel and Queiroz, João  (2008) Emergence of Self-Organized Symbol-Based Communication in Artificial Creatures.  [Journal (Paginated)]    (In Press)  
document_url: http://cogprints.org/6320/1/Loulaetal%28inpress%29Emergence-of-Self-Organized-Symbol-Based-Communication-in-Artificial-Creatures%28preprint%29.pdf