8th German Workshop On Artificial Life

Since its inception in the 1980s, Artificial Life is an interdisciplinary field of science focused on abstracting the essential features and dynamics of living systems in order to create artificial, life-like systems. The GWAL meetings intend to provide the opportunity for biologists, physicists, information and computer scientists, chemists, mathematicians, and philosophers interested in this field to present and discuss their new results. --from publisher description.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL 2007, held in Lisbon, Portugal. The 125 revised full papers cover morphogenesis and development, robotics and autonomous agents, evolutionary computation and theory, cellular automata, models of biological systems and their applications, ant colony and swarm systems, evolution of communication, simulation of social interactions, self-replication, artificial chemistry.

To built intelligent systems that can cope with real world problems we need to - velop computational mechanisms able to deal with very large amounts of data, gen- ate complex plans, schedules, and resource allocation strategies, re-plan their actions in real time, provide user friendly communication for human-device interactions, and perform complex optimization problems. In each of these tasks intelligence techno- gies play an important role, providing designers and creators with effective and adequate computational models. The field of intelligence technologies covers a variety of computational approaches that are often suggested and inspired by biological systems, exhibiting functional richness and flexibility of their natural behavior. This class of technologies consists of such important approaches as data mining algorithms, neural networks, genetic al- rithms, fuzzy and multi-valued logics, rough sets, agent-oriented computation, often integrated into complex hybrid solutions. Intelligence technologies are used to built machines that can act and think like living systems, solve problems in an autonomous way, develop rich private knowledge bases and produce results not foreseen and programmed in a direct way by designers and creators.