Proceedings from the ninth International Conference on Artificial Life; papers by scientists of many disciplines focusing on the principles of organization and applications of complex, life-like systems. Artificial Life is an interdisciplinary effort to investigate the fundamental properties of living systems through the simulation and synthesis of life-like processes. The young field brings a powerful set of tools to the study of how high-level behavior can arise in systems governed by simple rules of interaction. Some of the fundamental questions include: What are the principles of evolution, learning, and growth that can be understood well enough to simulate as an information process? Can robots be built faster and more cheaply by mimicking biology than by the product design process used for automobiles and airplanes? How can we unify theories from dynamical systems, game theory, evolution, computing, geophysics, and cognition? The field has contributed fundamentally to our understanding of life itself through computer models, and has led to novel solutions to complex real-world problems across high technology and human society. This elite biennial meeting has grown from a small workshop in Santa Fe to a major international conference. This ninth volume of the proceedings of the international A-life conference reflects the growing quality and impact of this interdisciplinary scientific community.

This book brings together a series of overview articles that appeared in the first three issues of the groundbreaking journal Artificial Life.

Topics include self-organization, the origins of life, natural selection, evolutionary computation, neural networks, communication, artificial worlds, software agents, philosophical issues in artificial life, ethical problems, and learning and development. Researchers in artificial life attempt to use the physical representation of lifelike phenomena to understand the organizational principles underlying the dynamics of living systems. The goal of the 1997 European Conference on Artificial Life is to provoke new understandings of the relationships between the natural and the artificial. Topics include self-organization, the origins of life, natural selection, evolutionary computation, neural networks, communication, artificial worlds, software agents, philosophical issues in artificial life, ethical problems, and learning and development.

Proceedings from the Tenth International Conference on Artificial Life, marking two decades of interdisciplinary research in this growing scientific community.Artificial Life is an interdisciplinary effort to investigate the fundamental properties of living systems through the simulation and synthesis of life-like processes in artificial media. The field brings a powerful set of tools to the study of how high-level behavior can arise in systems governed by simple rules of interaction.This tenth volume marks two decades of research in this interdisciplinary scientific community, a period marked by vast advances in the life sciences. The field has contributed fundamentally to our understanding of life itself through computer models, and has led to novel solutions to complex real-world problems--from disease prevention to stock market prediction--across high technology and human society. The proceedings of the biennial A-life conference--which has grown over the years from a small workshop in Santa Fe to a major international meeting--reflect the increasing importance of the work to all areas of contemporary science.

This enthralling book alerts us to nothing less than the existence of new varieties of life. Some of these species can move and eat, see, reproduce, and die. Some behave like birds or ants. One such life form may turn out to be our best weapon in the war against AIDS. What these species have in common is that they exist inside computers, their DNA is digital, and they have come into being not through God's agency but through the efforts of a generation of scientists who seek to create life in silico. But even as it introduces us to these brilliant heretics and unravels the intricacies of their work. Artificial Life examines its subject's dizzying philosophical implications: Is a self-replicating computer program any less alive than a flu virus? Are carbon-and-water-based entities merely part of the continuum of living things? And is it possible that one day "a-life" will look back at human beings and dismiss us as an evolutionary way station -- or, worse still, a dead end?

In addition to presenting the latest work in the field, Artificial Life V includes a retrospective and prospective look at both artificial and natural life with the aim of refining the methods and approaches discovered so far into viable, practical tools for the pursuit of science and engineering goals. May 16-18, 1996 · Nara, Japan Despite all the successes in computer engineering, adaptive computation, bottom-up AI, and robotics, Artificial Life must not become simply a one-way bridge, borrowing biological principles to enhance our engineering efforts in the construction of life-as-it-could-be. We must ensure that we give back to biology in kind, by developing tools and methods that will be of real value in the effort to understand life-as-it-is. Artificial Life V marks a decade since Christopher Langton organized the first workshop on artificial life--a decade characterized by the exploration of new possibilities and techniques as researchers have sought to understand, through synthetic experiments, the organizing principles underlying the dynamics (usually the nonlinear dynamics) of living systems. In addition to presenting the latest work in the field, Artificial Life V includes a retrospective and prospective look at both artificial and natural life with the aim of refining the methods and approaches discovered so far into viable, practical tools for the pursuit of science and engineering goals. Complex Adaptive Systems series

"In September 1987, the first workshop on Artificial Life was held at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Jointly sponsored by the Center for Nonlinear Studies, the Santa Fe Institute, and Apple Computer Inc, the workshop brought together 160 computer scientists, biologists, physicists, anthropologists, and other assorted ""-ists,"" all of whom shared a common interest in the simulation and synthesis of living systems. During five intense days, we saw a wide variety of models of living systems, including mathematical models for the origin of life, self-reproducing automata, computer programs using the mechanisms of Darwinian evolution to produce co-adapted ecosystems, simulations of flocking birds and schooling fish, the growth and development of artificial plants, and much, much more The workshop itself grew out of my frustration with the fragmented nature of the literature on biological modeling and simulation. For years I had prowled around libraries, shifted through computer-search results, and haunted bookstores, trying to get an overview of a field which I sensed existed but which did not seem to have any coherence or unity. Instead, I literally kept stumbling over interesting work almost by accident, often published in obscure journals if published at all."