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Mutual Exclusivity in the Naming Game
The Categorisation Game or Naming Game looks at how agents in a population converge on a shared system for referring to continuous stimuli (Steels, 2005; Nowak & Krakauer, 1999). Agents play games...
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The Genesis of Grammar
In my previous post on linguistic replicators and major transitions, I mentioned grammaticalisation as a process that might inform us about the contentive-functional split in the lexicon. Naturally, it...
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Intelligence: Darwin vs. Wallace
It’s Charles Darwin’s birthday today! He’s 202. So in celebration I’ve written a post on the still ongoing controversy which the theory of evolution by natural selection caused and is causing,...
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Cultural inheritance in studies of artifical grammar learning
Recently, I’ve been attending an artificial language learning research group and have discovered an interesting case of cultural inheritance. Arthur Reber was one of the first researchers to look at...
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The Return of the Phoneme Inventories
Right, I already referred to Atkinson’s paper in a previous post, and much of the work he’s presented is essentially part of a potential PhD project I’m hoping to do. Much of this stems back to last...
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Cultural Evolution and the Impending Singularity
Prof. Alfred Hubler is an actual mad professor who is a danger to life as we know it. In a talk this evening he went from ball bearings in castor oil to hyper-advanced machine intelligence and from...
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A random walk model of linguistic complexity
EDIT: Since writing this post, I have discovered a major flaw with the conclusion which is described here. One of the problems with large-scale statistical analyses of linguistic typologies is the...
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Cultural Evolution and the Impending Singularity: The Movie
Here’s a video of a talk I gave at the Santa Fe Institute‘s Complex Systems Summer School (written with roboticist Andrew Tinka-check out him talking about his fleet of floating robots). The talk was...
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Degeneracy, Evolution and Language
Having had several months off, I thought I’d kick things off by looking at a topic that’s garnered considerable interest in evolutionary theory, known as degeneracy. As a concept, degeneracy is a well...
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Spurious correlation bonanza to mark Replicated Typo 2.0 reaching 100,000 hits
Replicated Typo 2.0 has reached 100,000 hits! The most popular search term that leads visitors here is ‘What makes humans unique?’ and part of the answer has to be our ability to transmit our culture....
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