Habitat Lab Maelzel - Embodied, Autonomous, Machine Intelligence

Afar Habitat:
This Virtual World emulates a paleo-ecology similar to those associated with early hominid development. Anthropologists refer to (Real-World) similar environments as "pristine" due to their lack of cultural artifacts. Human sociality may have emerged from within such an ecology among the species A. ramidus, A. afarensis, and or early Homo. Devoid of cultural artifacts but rich in physics-based stimuli, this simulation gives its embodied machine intelligence inhabitants a place in which to learn and to interact socially.
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Awash River Area (2 - 4 Million Years Ago)

Afar Habitat:
The embodied agents inhabiting this simulation are sexually dimorphic, have artificial chromosomes and biological needs, must forage for food, water, and avoid predators, can mate, and will eventually die. The offspring they produce will inherit from their parent's genes. A libOpenMetaverse API allows any suitably prepared C# engine access to an avatar's sensory affect and then to return motor effect. The simulation runs on a private LAN and the agent AIs are computed in real-time on a local cluster.

OpenSimulator

provides our Virtual World.

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Emergent Sociality and Collective Intelligence

Solutrean Migration:
Agent-based models let us test our beliefs about cause and explanation for complex social events. Circumscription, for example, was historically implicated as a causal explanation for migration. The recent exodus of refugees from the near east into Europe is no exception. Social simulation lets us consider and observe in real-time both the cause and effect of emulated human behavior under intense circumscription. This simulation considered one such hypothesis involving the

Peopling of the Western Hemisphere

roughly 20,000 years ago.

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Norfolk Canyon (20 Thousand Years Ago)

Solutrean Migration:
Late in the Pleistocene (20K years ago), earth's climate changed. Then, as today, ice-sheets melted and sea-levels rose. This was intense environmental circumscription. The area shown to the right was "dry" ground then but is now under 100 meters of Atlantic Ocean. Virtual World technology lets us simulate hard-to-imagine situations like this and to visualize how human activity will disappear from history. The area shown is reconstructed from

NOAA bathymetric data

off the coast of North America near the

Norfolk Submarine Canyon

.

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Migration Forced By Circumstance