Maybe you already heard about this project... I think this could be an interesting project for ECCO to collaborate with.
http://www.new-ties.org/mambo/
Emergence and complexity in socially-inspired artificial systems
The project is concerned with emergence and complexity in socially-inspired artificial systems. We will study large systems consisting of an environment and an inhabitant population. The main goal of the project is to realize an evolving artificial society capable of exploring the environment and developing its own image of this environment and the society through cooperation and interaction. We will work with virtual grid worlds and will set up environments that are sufficiently complex and demanding that communication and cooperation are necessary to adapt to the given tasks. The population's weaponry to develop advanced skills bottom-up consists of individual learning, evolutionary learning, and social learning.
Yes, this looks quite relevant, and it is worth exploring collaboration.
I use the occasion to remind everyone that you can all edit our public ECCO website (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ECCO/), using the login:
user: ECCO password: mediators
For these kinds of suggestions, the easiest is to directly add them to the most relevant page, which in this case is the new page on "Related websites", where I already added the link.
I hope all of you will from time to time add to and update the different ECCO pages. Particularly useful would be if you could add interesting references to the publications, working reports and bibliography pages. I would also appreciate if you add or update your biography (reachable via the "People" page).
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Francis Heylighen Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group Free University of Brussels http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
