Evolution of Communication and Language in Embodied Agents

A Synthetic Approach to the Study of the Evolution of Communication and Language.- Theoretical Aspects of Communication and Language.- Artificial Organisms with Human Language.- Evolution of Language as One of the Major Evolutionary Transitions.- Strategic Aspects of Communication.- Theoretical Tools in Modeling Communication and Language Dynamics.- Emergence of Scale-Free Syntax Networks.- Evolution of Communication.- Evolving Communication in Embodied Agents: Theory, Methods, and Evaluation.- Evolutionary Conditions for the Emergence of Communication.- Producer Biases and Kin Selection in the Evolution of Communication.- Evolution of Signaling in a Multi-Robot System: Categorization and Communication.- Evolution of Implicit and Explicit Communication in Mobile Robots.- Evolving Communication in Embodied Agents: Assessment and Open Challenges.- Evolution of Language.- Modeling The Formation of Language in Embodied Agents: Methods and Open Challenges.- Modeling the Formation of Language: Embodied Experiments.- Mathematical Modeling of Language Games.- Modeling the Formation of Language in Embodied Agents: Conclusions and Future Research.- Conclusion.- Embodied and Communicating Agents: Towards the Establishment of a Solid Theoretical and Methodological Framework.- Appendix: Software and Hardware Tools.- Evorobot*.- E-puck.- Babel.

From the reviews:"One of the most challenging problems in human cognition is the origin of language. ... The editors of this book have brought together two communities of researchers to record the current state of the research agenda and report some recent advances. ... This volume is a fascinating summary of the state of the art in a challenging area of research. It serves as a sobering reminder of how far we are from a consistent bottom-up explanation of the wonder of human language." (H. Van Dyke Parunak, ACM Computing Reviews, December, 2010)