You are currently reading the book version of my doctoral dissertation which I successfully defended at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel on 10th November 2000, slightly more than 15 years ago at the time of writing this preface.

I feel privileged to have been the very first to implement Luc Steels’ language game paradigm on a robotic platform. As you will read, the robots I used at that moment were very limited in their sensing, computational resources and motor control. Moreover, I spent much time repairing the robots, as they were built from LEGO parts (not LEGO Mindstorms, which was not yet available at the start of my research) and a homemade sensorimotor board.

As a result, the experimental setup and the evolved lexicons were also very limited. Nevertheless, the process of implementing the model, carrying out the experiments and analysing these, has provided a wealth of insights and knowledge on lexicon grounding in an evolutionary context, which, I believe, are still relevant today.