I, Lucas Ryan Hope declare that this thesis is my own work and has
not been submitted in any form for another degree or diploma at
any university or other institute of tertiary education. Information
derived from the published and unpublished work of others has been
acknowledged in the text and a list of references is given in the
bibliography.
_______________________
Lucas Ryan Hope
November 18, 2000
The concept of emotion has undergone considerable change in the last few
decades, and it is now generally accepted that the emotional system is an
integral part of cognition. This has lead to a reinterpretation of
emotionality, resulting in a number of functional definitions of emotion.
Functional theories are interesting for a number of reasons; two of
these are that functional theories are more easily testable, and
whether these functions have developed through
neo-Darwinist evolution.
This project aimed to investigate the functionality
of the emotion system using artificial life,
as this method provides an environment with which fast, ethically viable
longitudinal experiments are possible.
To this end, I extended an artificial life program written in Lisp
to perform experiments based on a classical predator/prey scenario,
and designed statistics to measure the emotional effects
of the predator species on members of the prey species.
The results showed the prey species evolving to deliberate less,
and hence act more emotional,
due to the introduction of the predator species.
