Larry Yaeger's

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This is the place for (not necessarily up-to-date) information about:

More details on the Polyworld page, but I am pleased to say that a modern version of Polyworld open source, built atop Qt and OpenGL, is available through github at https://github.com/polyworld/polyworld. The SourceForge.net version is also still available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/polyworld, however all development since 2015 has been through the github repository.  Polyworld currently builds and runs on Mac OS X and Linux (though some folks have encountered an as yet problem on recent Linux releases). It has also been built and run on Windows, but the code may take some tweaking, and this isn't really a supported configuration.

Using Polyworld I have published papers on evolutionary increases in neural complexity, the evolution of Ideal Free Distributions (of agents to heterogeneous resources), and the evolution of small world networks absent the kind of physical constraints thought to produce these kinds of networks in biological brains (a few details and paper links on the Polyworld page). It has also been used at Keele University in the UK and three PhD students at Indiana University have used Polyworld to investigate the evolution of species (using gene cluster analysis identical to that used in biological studies), to study the role of neuromodulation in adaptive behavior, and to study the evolution of neural dynamics towards the edge of chaos.

On a related note, I've also prepared a list of relatively recent science fiction literature that I am particularly fond of.  It originally was intended just for a few friends, but it may be of interest to others looking for a good read, filled with interesting ideas.

I retired in August 2018, after spending six years at Google, doing machine learning and applying information theory to predictive modeling. From August 2004 to September 2012 I was a faculty member at Indiana University in the School of Informatics in the Complex Systems Group.   I continued working with Apple Computer one day/week for about a year and a half, overlapping my university work, but in February 2006 I finally ended my relationship with Apple, after something like 19 years.  My time in academia focused on my Artificial Life research and, of course, teaching responsibilities.  I taught one semester of "Introduction to Informatics", but mostly concentrated on my "Artificial Life as an approach to Artificial Intelligence" class for grad students and seniors and my "Introduction to Programming" class for sophomores.  I enjoyed both. Prior to Apple I wrote computer graphics software for Digital Productions from 1982 to 1987. And started my career in Aerospace Engineering at Grumman Aerospace ('72-'77), Rocketdyne ('77-'79), and Poseidon Research ('79-82).

I don't expect to put much time or energy into it, but in order to have a place to write arbitrary prose on any subject and, initially, to document a particular technical problem with certain drive docks, I created a blog at yaygrrrr.blogspot.com. I'm particularly fond of "Infinite != All", "It's orthogonal, dammit!", and "I'm determined it's deterministic (maybe)".


email: _lsy_(at)_pobox_(dot)_com_  (remove underscores and make the obvious substitutions for "(at)" and "(dot)")

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