I'll be posting more about the California phenomenology circle in coming weeks (and how Susi Ferrarello is resurrecting it!) but for now here's what I'm planning to present :)

Is this fair? Have there been advances in argumentation theory or debate mapping I'm leaving out? I do think debate maps have become more popular in the classroom, which is a welcome development.

Jeff Yoshimi Corey J. Maley you mean the human brain, right? ;)

It's been a hectic few weeks and so I am late posting about this cool poster Kanly Thao made as part of uroc.ucmerced.edu. He evolved a #simbrain network for optimal resource pursuit (get food when hungry, but don't waste energy). Shown here is a top performer.

What's cool is we have genes coding not just for traditional parameters like bias and weight strength, but also for more abstract things like spatial connectivity patterns and update rules (and simbrain 4 has lots of each).

Kanly came up with ways to characterize the behaviors we observed, distinguishing fast “lawnmowing” from different kinds of conditional behaviors, like speeding up only when smelling food. He's posted some of his results here tbmvthao.github.io/SampleEvosims/

The framework emerged from discussion with Luis Cayetano Simmari, as well as Cody Moser and Paul Smaldino. This is just a beginning, and there is much more to do, but we are grateful to Kanly for producing the first actual results. Great job Kanly!