  The current work addresses a virtual environment with self-replicating agents
whose decisions are based on a form of "somatic computation" (soma - body) in
which basic emotional responses, taken in parallelism to actual living
organisms, are introduced as a way to provide the agents with greater reflexive
abilities. The work provides a contribution to the field of Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (ALife) in connection to a
neurobiology-based cognitive framework for artificial systems and virtual
environments' simulations. The performance of the agents capable of emotional
responses is compared with that of self-replicating automata, and the
implications of research on emotions and AI, in connection to both virtual
agents as well as robots, is addressed regarding possible future directions and
applications.
