0.3. Motivations
The objective of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of the behavioural basis
of cognition. We do this in three ways:
We expose a behaviours production system (Gonzalez, 2000) that is able to simulate
many properties of adaptive animal behaviour. This gives the community a tool for engineering
adaptive artificial creatures, and also contributes to the understanding of animal adaptive
behaviour itself.
We present a simple social model for imitation and induction of behaviours. This helps
us understand better social systems, and also gives us a tool for engineering artificial social
systems.
Finally, we build a Behaviours Virtual Laboratory (Gershenson, Gonzalez, and Negrete,
2000b) incorporating the mentioned behaviours production system and social model in artificial
animals (animats (Wilson, 1985)). This allows us to experiment and simulate conditions from
real and artificial systems.
0.4. Structure
This thesis has been structured in the following way:
Chapter 1 makes an introduction to Behaviour-based Systems, their background in
artificial intelligence, their properties, and areas where they have been applied.
In Chapter 2 we make an introduction to complex systems, to then fall into the theme
of Artificial Societies, their characteristics, and previous work related with them.
Chapter 3 deals with Behaviour-based Intelligence. We first make a short review of
behaviour-based systems for the control of artificial creatures. Then we present the Behavioural
Columns Architecture (BeCA) (Gonzalez, 2000), a context-free behaviours production system,
and its properties.
In Chapter 4 we introduce our simple social model of imitation and induction (I&I),
which allows social processes to emerge using a behaviour-based approach.
In Chapter 5 we present our Behaviours Virtual Laboratory (BVL) (Gershenson, et. al.,
2000b), its components and functionality.
Chapter 6 consists of two series of experiments elaborated in our BVL: one to test
intelligence emerging from BeCA, and another to test social phenomena emerging from the
interactions of the animats socializing through I&I.
At the end of the thesis we include a brief glossary, giving a notion of important terms
used through the thesis.
This thesis is available in PDF format at http://132.248.11.4/~carlos/asia, with images
in colour.
Figure 2 shows a graphical structure of the thesis.