Artificial-Life Ecosystems: What are they and what could they become?

摘要

This paper summarises the history of the terms ecology and ecosystem, before examining their application in the early and recent literature of A-Life agent-based software simulation. It investigates trends in A-Life that have led to a predominance of simulations incorporating artificial evolution acting on generic agents, but lacking a level of detail that would allow the emergence of phenomena relating to the transfer and transformation of energy and matter between the virtual abiotic environment and biota. Implications of these characteristics for the relevance of A-Life's virtual ecosystem models to Ecology are discussed. We argue a position that the inclusion of low-level representations of energetics, matter and evolution, in concert with pattern-oriented modelling techniques from Ecology for model validation, will improve the relevance of A-Life models to Ecology. We also suggest two methods that may allows us to meet this goal: artificial evolution can be employed as a mechanism for automating pattern-oriented ecological modelling from the level of individual species up to that of the ecosystem, or it may be employed to explore general principles of ecosystem behaviour over evolutionary time periods.