Advances in Artificial Life: Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems: Editorial

Abstract

Artificial Life (hereafter ALife) is an interdisciplinary research field that has the purpose of gaining a better understanding of biological life by artificially synthesizing simple and novel forms of life, as well as reproducing lifelike properties of living systems. Synthesis of artificial cells, simulation of large-scale biological networks, intelligent use of exponentially growing amounts of biochemical data, exploitation of biological substrates for computation and control, and deployment of bio-inspired engineering are just some of the main issues of ALife and nowadays are cutting-edge topics.ALife is at the intersection between a theoretical perspective, namely, the scientific explanations of different levels of life organization (e.g., molecules, compartments, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, societies, and collective and social phenomena) and advanced technological applications (bio-inspired algorithms and techniques for building up effective solutions such as in the fields of robotics, big data analysis, and computational medicine).This special issue presents the top six articles—revised and extended—that were presented at ECAL 2013, the twelfth European Conference on Artificial Life, which was held in Taormina, Sicily, Italy, September 2–6, 2013 (http://www.dmi.unict.it/ecal2013/). ECAL 2013 was a grand scientific celebration with hundreds of paper and poster presentations (for a total of 267 submissions, 10 workshops, 16 tracks, and more than 350 attendants) by leading scientists in the field, which have described an impressive array of results, ideas, technologies, and applications, thus showing the current state of the art of ALife. The aim of this special issue is to give an incentive for boosting interest and new ideas in designing life and lifelike processes at different levels of complexity.After a careful peer-review process, only the top six research manuscripts, extended and revised, of ECAL 2013 have been selected for inclusion in this special issue.In “Multi-crease Self-folding by Global Heating,” by Shuhei Miyashita, Cagdas Onal, and Daniela Rus, the authors present a scheme for the autonomous folding of the body of a 3D robot from a 2D sheet using heat. They developed an easy, fast, and reliable fabrication technique for constructing a self-folding sheet. In particular, they exploit the thermal deformation of a constructive sheet sandwich made of rigid structural layers, and they utilize the V-fold method to attain the targeted folding angles. The authors also developed a mobile robot that uses such a self-folding body and that performs locomotion by using two vibration motors. The locomotion of the robot proves the functionality of the self-folding origami structure.In “The Search for Candidate Relevant Subsets of Variables in Complex Systems,” by M. Villani, A. Roli, A. Filisetti, M. Fiorucci, I. Poli, and R. Serra, the authors present a method to identify relevant subsets of variables for the comprehension of the organization of a dynamical system. Thus, the dynamical cluster index (DCI)—an information-theoretic measure—is introduced; the DCI relies on observations of current values of the relationships among the system variables, and does not require any previous knowledge. The usefulness of this method was tested in different application domains, where a known dynamical model generates the data, and the aim of the DCI is to uncover significant aspects of the organization of the model. One of the main novelties of this work is in the use of truly dynamical systems.In “Indirectly Encoding Running and Jumping Sodarace Creatures for Artificial Life,” by Paul Szerlip and Kenneth O. Stanley, the authors present a platform for evolving two-dimensional artificial creatures, whose aim is to serve for future artificial life experiments in evolving creatures. They introduce a new, indirectly encoded Sodarace (IESoR) system, which extends the original Sodarace by enabling the evolution of significantly mor