[4] Animat research, a subset of Artificial Life studies, has become rather popular since Rodney Brooks' seminal paper "Intelligence without representation".
[6] Norbert Wiener's theories postulated in the 1948 Cybernetics is also said to have inspired the simulation of animals, particularly the brain and behaviors of frogs (Rana computatrix), rats, and monkeys.
[7] In its early conceptualization, the animats - was built as simple creatures and simulated behaviors, which pertain to genetic reproduction and natural selection.
[5] Alan H Goldstein has proposed that, because nanobiotechnology is in the process of creating real animal-materials, speculative use of this term should be discouraged and its application become purely phenomenological.
Goldstein's basic premise is that in the age of nanobiotechnology it is necessary to follow the chemistry and molecular engineering rather than watching for the emergence of some pre-conceived minimum level of 'intelligence' such as an artificial neural network capable of adaptive phenomena.
The enormous transformative power of novel molecular engineering has the potential to create Animats, true nonbiological life forms, whose relatively simple behavior would not fit into most standard A-Life paradigms.