author : Owen E. Holland

Books

• The Mechanical Mind in History. 2008, with Philip Husbands, Michael Wheeler

Short works

• An Investigation of Two Mediation Strategies Suitable for Behavioural Control in Animals and Animats. 1991. (In From Animals to Animats )
• The Application of Temporal Difference Learning to the Neural Control of Quadruped Locomotion. 1992. (In Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems )
• An Embodied Neurally-Based Algorithm for Optimal Action Selection (summary). 1993. (In From Animals to Animats 2 )
• From Local Actions to Global Tasks: Stigmergy and Collective Robotics. 1994. (In Artificial Life IV )
• Getting the Most from the Least: Lessons for the Nanoscale from Minimal Mobile Agents. 1996. (In Artificial Life V )
• Grey Walter: The Pioneer of Real Artificial Life. 1996. (In Artificial Life V )
• Chorusing and Controlled Clustering for Minimal Mobile Agents. 1997. (In Fourth European Conference on Artificial Life )
• Edges and Computation in Excitable Media. 1998. (In Artificial Life VI )
• Artificial Autonomy in the Natural World: Building a Robot Predator. 1999. (In Advances in Artificial Life, ECAL'99 )
• Laziness + Sensitivity + Mobility = Structure: Emergence of Patterns in Lattice Swarms. 1999. (In Advances in Artificial Life, ECAL'99 )
• Wet Artificial Brains: Towards the Chemical Control of Robot Motion by Reaction-Diffusion and Excitable Media. 1999. (In Advances in Artificial Life, ECAL'99 )

Books : reviews

Philip Husbands, Owen E. Holland, Michael Wheeler.
The Mechanical Mind in History.
MIT Press. 2008

The idea of intelligent machines has become part of popular culture, and tracing the history of the actual science of machine intelligence reveals a rich network of cross-disciplinary contributions—the unrecognized origins of ideas now central to artificial intelligence, artificial life, cognitive science, and neuroscience. In The Mechanical Mind in History, scientists, artists, historians, and philosophers discuss the multidisciplinary quest to formalize and understand the generation of intelligent behavior in natural and artificial systems as a wholly mechanical process.

The contributions illustrate the diverse and interacting notions that chart the evolution of the idea of the mechanical mind. They describe the mechanized mind as, among other things, an analogue system, an organized suite of chemical interactions, a self-organizing electromechanical device, an automated general-purpose information processor, and an integrated collection of symbol manipulating mechanisms. They investigate the views of pivotal figures that range from Descartes and Heidegger to Alan Turing and Charles Babbage, and they emphasize such frequently overlooked areas as British cybernetic and pre-cybernetic thinkers. The volume concludes with the personal insights of five highly influential figures in the field: John Maynard Smith, John Holland, Oliver Selfridge, Horace Barlow, and Jack Cowan.