Background
Since the mid-1980's, there has been rapidly growing interest in research studying the behavioural and evolutionary foundations of cognition and intelligence. Studies of computation as an emergent phenomenon, cognition as adaptive behaviour, coordinated perception and action, and evolutionary learning techniques (such as genetic algorithms) can all be broadly classified as work in Artificial Life. The study of systems which exhibit adaptive behaviour has received growing attention from workers in fields as diverse as ethology, robotics, neuroscience, cognitive science, economics and linguistics.
Increasing numbers of Artificial Intelligence researchers are addressing such fundamental issues, as an adjunct to the more usual focus on high-level cognitive functions such as natural-language understanding or planning for complex tasks.
Work in this area is often holistic: 'complete' autonomous agents are studied as cognitive systems interacting with their environments. This places emphasis on understanding mechanisms responsible for generation of behaviour, rather than on individual cognitive functions; and hence on understanding the interactions between the agent and its environment, rather than on isolated disembodied intellects. The term autonomous agents includes animals, mobile robots, and software agents inhabiting virtual realities. Artificial autonomous agents are more commonly known as animats.
Methods of study, and mechanisms developed, vary depending on the phenomena addressed: rule-based systems, neural networks and simple finite-state automata have all been employed with success.
Work in adaptive behaviour and artificial life has been underway at Sussex since 1988. We are probably the most active European research group in this field. Sussex's interdisciplinary ethos has enabled the strengthening of links between members of the Department of Informatics (formerly the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, COGS), robotics researchers in the School of Engineering, and biologists in the Sussex Centre for Neuroscience in the School of Life Sciences (formerly the School of Biological Sciences, BIOLS).
We are interested in understanding cognition in ethological, ecological, and evolutionary contexts. Some of our studies involve building autonomous mobile robots, while others take place in complex computer simulations that provide virtual realities for simulated agents. Some of our work also addresses wider issues in complex adaptive systems -- examples include: emergent computation, prebiotic artificial life, metatheoretical and philosophical issues and the global dynamics of discrete-time dynamical systems.