Embodied Artificial Life—Editorial

Abstract

ortant fact is that the debate continues. The debate concerns the reliability of a robot as a model of the animal under study. In parallel, the arti cial life community enjoys its own, similar debate: can simulation of the real world be reliable, or is embodiment a necessity in order to gain understanding about life? The discussion about simulation vs. embodiment is by no means new, and actually many researchers in both \\camps" have been players in the other. For instance, some of arti cial intelligence's great theoreticians have previously tried to build robots. In the late 1950s, Minsky and others tried to build a ball catching robot (derived from the initial wish to build a ping-pong playing robot), and in the early 1970s, McCarthy tried to build an assembly robot (that should assemble a television kit) [4]. None of the projects succeeded, and as is well-known, both researchers have moved away from embodied arti cial intelligence. A typical argument for going towards simulation