'From Animals to Animats 5': Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior
The Fifth International Conference on Adaptive Behavior (SAB98) was held at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) in 1998. The conference is an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers from various backgrounds such as ethology, theoretical biology, psychology, artificial life, machine learning, and robotics. These researchers study adaptive behavior for different reasons, most notably “explaining” and “building.” Some papers attempt to model biological behavior. Some of them then validate the models by running them on animats, often mobile robots, and compare the resulting behavior against that of animals. Other papers use the models to implement capabilities of animats that make them more robust or efficient. Some papers base their methods very faithfully on biological systems. Other papers are content if their methods have the same input/output behavior as biological systems. Still other papers use biological systems only as an inspiration for their methods. Finally, there are papers that do not pay attention to biological systems at all but whose results still provide insight into which capabilities are necessary to implement certain kinds of behaviors and which internal structures facilitate their implementation, possibly resulting in hypotheses about how biological systems work. The papers are grouped into categories such as Theoretical Issues, Perception and Visually Guided Behavior, Action Selection and Behavioral Sequences, Navigation, Emergent Structures and Behaviors, Learning, Motor Learning, Collective Behavior, and Evolution. The papers are diverse. Some papers study single behaviors, others study the interaction of behaviors. Some papers study single animats, others study groups of animats. Some papers perform experiments in simulation, others use physical systems. The papers use methods such as neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, differential equations, reinforcement learning, and non-linear control methods to study behaviors such as: