Moments after a baseball batter has hit a fly ball, an outfielder has to decide whether to run forward or backward to catch the ball. Judging a fly ball is a difficult task, especially when the fielder is in the plane of the ball's trajectory. There exists several alternative hypotheses in the...

How does an evolutionary process interact with a decentralized, distributed system in order to produce globally coordinated behavior? Using a genetic algorithm (GA) to evolve cellular automata (CAs), we show that the evolution of spontaneous synchronization, one type of emergent coordination,...

We investigate the ability of a genetic algorithm to design cellular automata that perform computations. The computational strategies of the resulting cellular automata can be understood using a framework in which "particles" embedded in space-time configurations carry information and...