Document: Modelling Autopoiesis: Harder Than It May Seem!

Initial work on re-implementing a computational model of autopoiesis was carried out by my former Hyder Aswad. I am grateful to Francoise Jullien and John Mingers for making available their independent re-implementations of the model of (Varela et al., 1974). I especially acknowledge the open and generous assistance of Francisco Varela.

This work described here was carried out while I was a visiting researcher (1996/97) with the Swarm Project Group at the Santa Fe Institute . I am very grateful to Chris Langton of SFI for hosting that visit. The visit was made possible by generous support from Dublin City University and the Swarm Project. Swarm has been supported by Grant No. N00014-94-1-G014 from the Department of the Navy, Naval Research Laboratory, acting in cooperation with the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Swarm has also benefited from earlier support from The Carol O'Donnell Foundation and from Mr. and Mrs. Michael Grantham.

Finally, I thank the organisers and sponsors of Biology, Cognition, Language & Society: An International Symposium on Autopoiesis, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, November 1997, for so kindly inviting me to participate in this symposium.

All errors in the current article remain, of course, my own responsibility.

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Modelling Autopoiesis: Harder Than It May Seem!

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Document: Modelling Autopoiesis: Harder Than It May Seem!

mcmullin@eeng.dcu.ie

Acknowledgments