========================== LEE release 1.1 Latent Energy Environments ========================== This directory contains materials related to the Latent Energy Environments (LEE) software package. LEE is an artificial life simulator which can be used to evolve populations of neural networks adapting to environments of increasing complexity. The files in this directory are maintained by fil@ucsd.edu and correspond to the latest LEE Release. The same source code (written in C) works for both the Unix and Macintosh platforms. The only difference is that the Macintosh version requires a few extra files. Below follows a descriptions of the files in the directory. You must use the Unix 'unshar' utility to retrieve the source and/or executable files. LEE is (c) University of California, San Diego. Authors: Richard Belew and Filippo Menczer. Please send important comments, suggestions, and bugs to the latter (fil@ucsd.edu). You may freely copy/distribute the software, except for commercial purposes, and as long and the notices in the source headers are preserved. Filename Format Content ---------------------------------------------------------------- README ASCII general info (this file) lee.doc ASCII documentation pinep.ps.Z compressed PostScript LEE model/results paper lee11.Unix.sh ASCII shar archive LEE 1.1 Unix source lee11.Mac.sh mixed shar archive LEE 1.1 Mac add'l source lee11exe.Mac.sh binhexed shar archive LEE 1.1 Mac executables ---------------------------------------------------------------- LIST OF RELATED PAPERS (as of February 1994) ============================================ Menczer F and Belew RK 'Latent Energy Environments: A Model for Artificial Life Complexity' Technical Report CS93-298, July 1993, University of California, San Diego Menczer F and Belew RK 'Latent Energy Environments: A Tool for Artificial Life Simulations' Technical Report CS93-301, July 1993, University of California, San Diego Menczer F 'Changing Latent Energy Environments: A Case for the Evolution of Plasticity' Technical Report CS94-336, January 1994, University of California, San Diego (*) Menczer F and Belew RK 'Latent Energy Environments' to appear in "Plastic Individuals in Evolving Populations", Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Addison-Wesley (*) This paper is available on this ftp site as 'pinep.ps.Z'. You can use 'uncompress paper.ps' to get the Postscript format, and 'lpr paper.ps' to print. An abstract follows: A novel ALife model and simulator, called LEE, is introduced and described. The motivation lies in the need for a measure of complexity across different ALife experiments. This goal is achieved through a careful characterization of environments in which different forms of energy are well-defined and conserved. A steady-state genetic algorithm is used to model the evolutionary process. Organisms in the population are modeled by neural networks with non-Lamarckian learning during life. Behaviors are shown to be crucial in the interactions between organisms and their environment. The flexibility of LEE for the study of a variety of problems related to complex evolutionary systems is illustrated by some general emerging properties of the model, and by preliminary results of a number of experiment currently under way. === Filippo Menczer and Richard K. Belew Cognitive Computer Science Research Group Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, 0114 University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093-0114 USA Fax: (619)534-7029 Email: fil@ucsd.edu ===