Special Issue for the 20th Anniversary of the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2011)

摘要

This special issue pays tribute to 20 years of artificial life research in Europe. Since its inception around a coffee table in Paris in the summer of 1990, the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL) has grown and evolved to incorporate multiple research disciplines that aim to combine the natural and computational sciences. In addition to extending a long and rich tradition in theoretical biology present at that time in Europe toward the computational sciences and engineering, ECAL has also provided a platform for different innovative ideas that have produced a significant impact on other research domains or have resulted in novel research directions with their own workshops and conferences. This influence continues today, with the consideration of the different models and methods that are currently extensively used to answer biological questions in domains such as computational and systems biology. This evolution will benefit the field and will ensure that our models continue to push the envelope as they have been doing for the last two decades.Together with the reviewers and conference chairs of ECAL 2011 in Paris, we selected a small number of especially interesting contributions among the conference's 128 accepted submissions. Their authors were asked to extend their manuscripts for a wider audience and to provide more details than what was allowed by the conference format. The reader can find below a brief description of these articles, which range from artificial chemistry to evolutionary robotics and computational biology. We hope that this selection will provide an incentive for researchers from related fields to pay closer attention to the innovations created within the artificial life community and to motivate researchers already interested in this field to make further advances in the realism and influence of their models. In the following we summarize the topics discussed in this special issue.Xabier Barandiaran and Matthew Egbert study how norms become established from an organism-centered perspective. They give an in-depth analysis and evaluation of a minimal model capable of establishing norms dynamically. The model clearly opens a novel road toward answering questions associated to the notion of minimal agency, which is essential to a wide variety of artificial life models.The work of Navneet Bhalla, Peter Bentley, Peter Vize, and Christian Jacob focuses on the use of staging in the context of physical self-assembling systems made of magnetic shapes. They investigate whether replacing a full mix with gradual addition of morphological information manages to produce more stable constructs for systems composed of elements with heterogeneous properties. They show that this staging methodology can solve complex self-assembly problems by reducing the possibilities of errors in the shape-matching process.Tom Froese, Nathaniel Virgo, and Takashi Ikegami argue in the third article that time scales should play a central role in all models aiming to answer questions linked to the origin of life. Using a reaction-diffusion model, they assert that adaptive behavior realized at intermediate time scales by spatiotemporally localized self-producing systems may have been already present in the beginnings, and conclude with the feasibility of a movement-first approach to the origin of life.In the fourth contribution, Heiko Hamann, Thomas Schmickl, and Karl Crailsheim investigate the relevance of statistical mechanics, and more specifically of the fluctuation theorem, to understanding the collective behavior of simulated swarms. They are able to show that an inverted fluctuation theorem is present in this type of systems, which they claim may be generally applicable to different self-organizing systems studied in artificial life.Tsutomu Oohashi, Tadao Maekawa, Osamu Ueno, Norie Kawai, Emi Nishina, and Manabu Honda investigate a completely different question: Can organisms evolve to give up their immortality? Using an arti