Artificial Intelligence captured my imagination in graduate school, nearly twenty years ago. I taught this course at DePauw University for several years and then gravitated to the subfield, Artificial Life, as I began to collaborate with
Wade Hazel, a biologist.
Science Research Fellows ( SRF):
Wade and I taught the SRF First-year Seminar class together, for several years. We developed research projects involving the maintenance of conditional strategies that have environmentally-cued threshold traits. For example, the SRF group pictured to the left developed genetic algorithms to write a simulation for acorn barnacles and predator snails. The conditional strategy of barnacles involves growing "bent" to avoid the predator rather than in a conic/"volcano-like" shape, whereby the snail can easily kill the barnacle and feed upon it. The barnacles receive cues from the snails, as they leave a chemical trail while crawling over the juvenile barnacles. The amount of cueing (reaching a certain threshold) determines the barnacle shape at maturity.

 
Summer Research with Students:

Artificial Life basically involves growing a virtual population of organisms and allowing them to interact with each other and their environments over thousands of generations. Wade and I conducted research with students, using the barnacles and snails problem and an additional problem involving the co-evolution of snails and parasites.

Experimental Class:
The success of the SRF and summer research work led Wade and me to develop a similarly-themed class for students who did not participate in the SRF program. Details of the class are contained in a paper we published (Computer Science and Biology Get A-Life, The Journal of Computing in Small Colleges, Vol. 17, No. 1 (October 2001), 9-16) and in two sets of Web pages that our students authored about their projects (e.g. sensory bias of female birds.)  The picture to the right captures our field trip to Indiana University, where we visited graduate students conducting robotics research using genetic algorithms:  This hexapod "learned" to walk.
Experimental Class:

Wade recently submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation for a multi-disciplinary (biology, chemistry, mathematics and computer science) project. The new research, if funded, will involve pupal color in swallowtail butterflies.
As in the barnacle population, butterfly pupal color varies with pupation color site. Again, the pupal color, green or brown, is thought to be an environmentally cued threshold trait.  As I am a co-PI for this grant proposal, my students will have the opportunity to pursue artificial life research, if the proposal is accepted.
Authors
Banner Photo (left): Marilyn Culler
Last updated: January 22, 2001