In this paper we describe a number of experiments in which the ideas of multi-cellular evolution are applied to digital organisms in an artificial ecology. The individual organisms are parallel programs in a shared memory virtual computer where evolution by natural selection is shown to lead to increasing levels of parallelism.

Swarm Cognition is the juxtaposition of two relatively unrelated concepts that evoke, on the one hand, the power of collective behaviours displayed by natural swarms, and on the other hand the complexity of cognitive processes in the vertebrate brain. Recently, scientists from various disciplines suggest that, at a certain level of description, operational principles used to account for the beh...

Perhaps one day our machines will be able to take us beyond environments which look more and more familiar as we traverse them, into spaces which continue to surprise us as we explore. Can our engineered artefacts ever rival the intricacy of nature?

I review the history of work in Artificial Life on the problem of the open-ended evolutionary growth of complexity in computational worlds. This is then put into the context of evolutionary epistemology and human creativity. ∗Parts of this text are based on a book chapter, co-authored with Wolfgang Banzhaf, for the forthcoming Springer Handbook of Natural Computing (Rozenberg et al., 2010). †ht...

The first part of this paper explores the general issues in using Artificial Life techniques to program actual mobile robots. In particular it explores the difficulties inherent in transferring programs evolved in a simulated environment to run on an actual robot. It examines the dual evolution of organism morphology and nervous systems in biology. It proposes techniques to capture some of the ...

Artificial Life as a field of research attempts to synthesize life in silico by using computers to create virtual life. By definition life and artificial life should display the following characteristics: self-organization, metabolization, self-reproduction, and adaptive evolution. Until now, most Artificial Life inspired artworks have created artificial characters or creatures that display som...

Drawing on our own art/science practices and a series of interviews with artificial life practitioners, we explore the entanglement of developments at the artistic edges of artificial life. We start by defining key terms from Karen Barad's agential realism. We then diffractively read artificial life together with agential realism to discuss the potential for interventions in the field. Through ...

Despite the popularity of artificial life over the last 15 years or so, as witnessed by the establishment of several international conferences on the subject and the birth of the Artificial Life Journal and similar publications, there has been a conspicuous lack of decent introductory texts on the subject. Notable exceptions include “Artificial Life: An Introduction” (Langton 1995), an eclectic...