ABSTRACT
One of man's most ancient and perplexing problems has been to understand the nature of his own mental processes. The invention of the computer has, for many, suggested a promising approach based on the study of information processing and artificial intelligence. The conditions needed for a selective system are: a collection of variant entities, or repertoire, capable of responding to the environment; sufficient opportunities for those entities actually to encounter the environment; and a mechanism to enhance or amplify differentially the numbers or strengths of those entities whose responses to the environment are in some sense adaptive. In devising the Darwin II model, were guided by a number of ground rules. It was obvious that the system should be a network. The nodes of this network are the recognizing elements of the model, corresponding to the groups of neurons postulated by the theory.
