Larry Yaeger's

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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 new development, from 2015 on, will be through the github repository.  Polyworld currently builds and runs on Mac OS X and Linux. It has also been built and run on Windows, but the code may take some tweaking.  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 using Polyworld (a few details and paper links on the Polyworld page). It has also been used at Keele University in the UK and two PhD students at Indiana University are using Polyworld currently, one to investigate the role of neuromodulation in adaptive behavior, the other to study 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.

Since September 2012 I have been employed 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.

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 have created a blog at yaygrrrr.blogspot.com.


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