Advances in Artificial Life

TheArti?cialLifetermappearedmorethan20yearsagoinasmallcornerofNew Mexico, USA. Since then the area has developed dramatically, many researchers joining enthusiastically and research groups sprouting everywhere. This frenetic activity led to the emergence of several strands that are now established ?elds in themselves. We are now reaching a stage that one may describe as maturer: with more rigour, more benchmarks, more results, more stringent acceptance criteria, more applications, in brief, more sound science. This, which is the n- ural path of all new areas, comes at a price, however. A certain enthusiasm, a certain adventurousness from the early years is fading and may have been lost on the way. The ?eld has become more reasonable. To counterbalance this and to encourage lively discussions, a conceptual track, where papers were judged on criteria like importance and/or novelty of the concepts proposed rather than the experimental/theoretical results, has been introduced this year. A conference on a theme as broad as Arti?cial Life is bound to be very - verse,but a few tendencies emerged. First, ?elds like ‘Robotics and Autonomous Agents’ or ‘Evolutionary Computation’ are still extremely active and keep on bringing a wealth of results to the A-Life community. Even there, however, new tendencies appear, like collective robotics, and more speci?cally self-assembling robotics, which represent now a large subsection. Second, new areas appear.

Conceptual Track.- Effect of Synthetic Emotions on Agents’ Learning Speed and Their Survivability.- From the Inside Looking Out: Self Extinguishing Perceptual Cues and the Constructed Worlds of Animats.- Globular Universe and Autopoietic Automata: A Framework for Artificial Life.- May Embodiment Cause Hyper-Computation?.- Perception as a Dynamical Sensori-Motor Attraction Basin.- Toward Genuine Continuity of Life and Mind.- Morphogenesis and Development.- Biological Development of Cell Patterns: Characterizing the Space of Cell Chemistry Genetic Regulatory Networks.- A Coarse-Coding Framework for a Gene-Regulatory-Based Artificial Neural Tissue.- A Computational Model of Cellular Morphogenesis in Plants.- A Developmental Model for Generative Media.- Evolutionary Simulations of Maternal Effects in Artificial Developmental Systems.- METAMorph: Experimenting with Genetic Regulatory Networks for Artificial Development.- Morphological Plasticity: Environmentally Driven Morphogenesis.- A Self-organising, Self-adaptable Cellular System.- Self-repair Ability of a Toroidal and Non-toroidal Cellular Developmental Model.- Simulating Evolution with a Computational Model of Embryogeny: Obtaining Robustness from Evolved Individuals.- Topology Changes Enable Reaction-Diffusion to Generate Forms.- Robotics and Autonomous Agents.- Aggregation Behaviour as a Source of Collective Decision in a Group of Cockroach-Like-Robots.- (Co)Evolution of (De)Centralized Neural Control for a Gravitationally Driven Machine.- Co-evolution of Structures and Controllers for Neubot Underwater Modular Robots.- CoEvolutionary Incremental Modelling of Robotic Cognitive Mechanisms.- A Dynamical Systems Approach to Learning: A Frequency-Adaptive Hopper Robot.- An Evolved Agent Performing Efficient Path Integration Based Homing and Search.- Evolving Neural Mechanisms for an Iterated Discrimination Task: A Robot Based Model.- Hysteresis and the Limits of Homeostasis: From Daisyworld to Phototaxis.- Is an Embodied System Ever Purely Reactive?.- t for Two Linear Synergy Advances the Evolution of Directional Pointing Behaviour.- Self-assembly on Demand in a Group of Physical Autonomous Mobile Robots Navigating Rough Terrain.- Superlinear Physical Performances in a SWARM-BOT.- Timescale and Stability in Adaptive Behaviour.- Whisker-Based Texture Discrimination on a Mobile Robot.- Evolutionary Computation and Theory.- Analysing the Evolvability of Neural Network Agents Through Structural Mutations.- Coevolutionary Species Adaptation Genetic Algorithms: A Continuing SAGA on Coupled Fitness Landscapes.- Evolution and the Regulation of Environmental Variables.- Evolutionary Transitions as a Metaphor for Evolutionary Optimisation.- Genetic Assimilation and Canalisation in the Baldwin Effect.- How Do Evolved Digital Logic Circuits Generalise Successfully?.- How Niche Construction Can Guide Coevolution.- Measuring Diversity in Populations Employing Cultural Learning in Dynamic Environments.- On a Quantitative Measure for Modularity Based on Information Theory.- On the Mean Convergence Time of Multi-parent Genetic Algorithms Without Selection.- The Quantitative Law of Effect is a Robust Emergent Property of an Evolutionary Algorithm for Reinforcement Learning.- Self-adaptation of Genome Size in Artificial Organisms.- Cellular Automata.- An Architecture for Modelling Emergence in CA-Like Systems.- The Density Classification Problem for Multi-states Cellular Automata.- Evolving Cellular Automata by 1/f Noise.- Evolving Sequential Combinations of Elementary Cellular Automata Rules.- Penrose Life: Ash and Oscillators.- Playing a 3D Game of Life in an Interactive Virtual Sandbox.- Using Dynamic Behavior Prediction to Guide an Evolutionary Search for Designing Two-Dimensional Cellular Automata.- Models of Biological Systems and Their Applications.- CelloS: A Multi-level Approach to Evolutionary Dynamics.- A Cytokine Formal Immune Network.- Examining Refuge Location Mechanisms in Intertidal Snails Using Artificial Life Simulation Techniques.- A Method for Designing Ant Colony Models and Two Examples of Its Application.- Simulating Artificial Organisms with Qualitative Physiology.- Slime Mould and the Transition to Multicellularity: The Role of the Macrocyst Stage.- Ant Colony and Swarm Systems.- Ant Clustering Embeded in Cellular Automata.- Ant-Based Computing.- Collective Behavior Analysis of a Class of Social Foraging Swarms.- Evolving Annular Sorting in Ant-Like Agents.- Flocking Control of Multiple Interactive Dynamical Agents with Switching Topology via Local Feedback.- Evolution of Communication.- Cultural and Biological Evolution of Phonemic Speech.- Grammar Structure and the Dynamics of Language Evolution.- Interactions Between Learning and Evolution in Simulated Avian Communication.- Perceptually Grounded Lexicon Formation Using Inconsistent Knowledge.- Simulation of Social Interactions.- Artificial Life Meets Anthropology: A Case of Aggression in Primitive Societies.- Emergence of Structure and Stability in the Prisoner’s Dilemma on Networks.- Multi-agent-based Simulation for Formation of Institutions on Socially Constructed Facts.- Self-replication.- Extensions and Variations on Construction of Autoreplicators in Typogenetics.- The Good Symbiont.- Self-description for Construction and Execution in Graph Rewriting Automata.- Artificial Chemistry.- Artificial Metabolic System: An Evolutionary Model for Community Organization in Metabolic Networks.- Explicit Collision Simulation of Chemical Reactions in a Graph Based Artificial Chemistry.- Self-replication and Evolution of DNA Crystals.- Posters.- All Else Being Equal Be Empowered.- Artificial Homeostatic System: A Novel Approach.- Artificial Life for Natural Language Processing.- A Co-evolutionary Epidemiological Model for Artificial Life and Death.- CoEvolution of Effective Observers and Observed Multi-agents System.- Comparative Reproduction Schemes for Evolving Gathering Collectives.- Construction-Based and Inspection-Based Universal Self-replication.- Coordinating Dual-Mode Biomimetic Robotic Fish in Box-Pushing Task.- Effects of Spatial Growth on Gene Expression Dynamics and on Regulatory Network Reconstruction.- Evolution of Song Communication in a 2D Space.- A Fitness-Landscape for the Evolution of Uptake Signal Sequences on Bacterial DNA.- The Genetic Coding Style of Digital Organisms.- Growing Biochemical Networks: Identifying the Intrinsic Properties.- Multi-population Cooperative Particle Swarm Optimization.- On Convergence of Dynamic Cluster Formation in Multi-agent Networks.- On the Unit of Selection in Sexual Populations.- Periodic Motion Control by Modulating CPG Parameters Based on Time-Series Recognition.- Self-organized Criticality on Growing Scale-Free Networks.- Synapsing Variable Length Crossover: An Algorithm for Crossing and Comparing Variable Length Genomes.- Valency for Adaptive Homeostatic Agents: Relating Evolution and Learning.