Yaeger 1994 cgp

This is a big review of polyworld, which we read for his talk. Poly world is really huge. It has helped me reconcile , at least a little, the role of alife in research. The paper with sporns and virgil did allow them to closely investigate an important question in biology by controlling variables that can't be controlled in other evolutionary contexts. And the 'existence proof' argument for ALIfe is satisfying enough for me. But the complexity of the Polyworld still makes me nervous. It looks like the system is complex enough that you can't easily quantify all of your qualitative observations. At that point, you have to do biology on simulated organisms, when the point of simulation is usually that you don't have to do biology. But I guess my taste is for simple models of complex systems.

Of course, the vision is really cool, as are the species. And it looks like he is moving in the direction of more quantitative measures of the paper's many observations.