This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL 2003, held in Dortmund, Germany in September 2003. The 96 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 140 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on artificial chemistries, self-organization, and self-replication; artificial societies; cellular and neural systems; evolution and development; evolutionary and adaptive dynamics; languages and communication; methodologies and applications; and robotics and autonomous agents.

Inhalt

Artificial Chemistries, Self-Organization, and Self-Replication.- A Universal Framework for Self-Replication.- Generic Properties of Chemical Networks: Artificial Chemistry Based on Graph Rewriting.- How to Program Artificial Chemistries.- Artificial Life as an Aid to Astrobiology: Testing Life Seeking Techniques.- Molecularly Accessible Permutations.- Simulating Evolution's First Steps.- Cellular Evolution in a 3D Lattice Artificial Chemistry.- Evolution of Rewriting Rule Sets Using String-Based Tierra.- Models for the Conservation of Genetic Information with String-Based Artificial Chemistry.- Interaction Based Evolution of Self-Replicating Loop Structures.- Artificial Societies.- Architectural Design for the Survival Optimization of Panicking Fleeing Victims.- Meta-evolutionary Game Dynamics for Mathematical Modelling of Rules Dynamics.- Preventing Bluff Agent Invasions in Honest Societies.- Effects of Group Composition and Level of Selection in the Evolution of Cooperation in Artificial Ants.- Effects of Learning to Interact on the Evolution of Social Behavior of Agents in Continuous Predators-Prey Pursuit Problem.- War and Peace among Artificial Nations - A Model and Simulation Based on a Two-Layered Multi-agent System.- Cellular and Neural Systems.- Developmental Neural Networks for Agents.- Revisiting Idiotypic Immune Networks.- Production of Gliders by Collisions in Rule 110.- A Computational Model of Neocortical-Hippocampal Cooperation and Its Application to Self-Localization.- Fascinating Rhythms by Chaotic Hopfield Networks.- Solving a Delayed Response Task with Spiking and McCulloch-Pitts Agents.- First Steps in Evolving Path Integration in Simulation.- Evolution and Development.- On the Dynamics of an Artificial Regulatory Network.- Evolution and Growth of Virtual Plants.- Evolvability of the Genotype-Phenotype Relation in Populations of Self-Replicating Digital Organisms in a Tierra-Like System.- An Evolutionary Approach to Damage Recovery of Robot Motion with Muscles.- Evolving Developmental Programs for Adaptation, Morphogenesis, and Self-Repair.- Evolving Embodied Genetic Regulatory Network-Driven Control Systems.- Evolution of Fault-Tolerant Self-Replicating Structures.- Evolving the Ability of Limited Growth and Self-Repair for Artificial Embryos.- Evolutionary and Adaptive Dynamics.- Caring versus Sharing: How to Maintain Engagement and Diversity in Coevolving Populations.- Culture and the Baldwin Effect.- Evolutionary Network Minimization: Adaptive Implicit Pruning of Successful Agents.- Population Dynamics under Spatially and Temporally Heterogenous Resource Limitations in Multi-agent Networks.- Adaptive Coupling and Intersubjectivity in Simulated Turn-Taking Behaviour.- Distributed Genetic Algorithm: Learning by Direct Exchange of Chromosomes.- An Approach to Describe the Tierra Instruction Set Using Microoperations: The First Result.- Critical Values in Asynchronous Random Boolean Networks.- Artificial Organisms That Sleep.- Visualizing Evolutionary Dynamics of Self-Replicators Using Graph-Based Genealogy.- The Baldwin Effect Revisited: Three Steps Characterized by the Quantitative Evolution of Phenotypic Plasticity.- Does the Red Queen Reign in the Kingdom of Digital Organisms?.- Languages and Communication.- Conditions for Stable Vowel Systems in a Population.- Piep Piep Piep - Ich Hab' Dich Lieb: Rhythm as an Indicator of Mate Quality.- Evolving Agent Societies with VUScape.- Why Synonymy Is Rare: Fitness Is in the Speaker.- A Noisy Way to Evolve Signaling Behaviour.- Language Games with Mixed Populations.- Artificial Agents and Natural Determiners.- Coevolution of Birdsong Grammar without Imitation.- Systemic Architecture for Audio Signal Processing.- Semantic Generalisation and the Inference of Meaning.- Language Evolution in Populations: Extending the Iterated Learning Model.- Learning Biases for the Evolution of Linguistic Structure: An Associative Network Model.- The Learning and Emergence of Mildly Context Sensitive Languages.- THSim v3.2: The Talking Heads Simulation Tool.- Grounded Lexicon Formation without Explicit Reference Transfer: Who's Talking to Who?.- Optimal Communication in a Noisy and Heterogeneous Environment.- Methodologies and Applications.- A Clustering Algorithm Based on the Ants Self-Assembly Behavior.- A Multi-agent Based Approach to Modelling and Rendering of 3D Tree Bark Textures.- Measuring the Dynamics of Artificial Evolution.- Pattern Recognition in a Bucket.- Discovering Clusters in Spatial Data Using Swarm Intelligence.- When Can We Call a System Self-Organizing?.- Contextual Random Boolean Networks.- Representation of Genotype and Phenotype in a Coherent Framework Based on Extended L-Systems.- Integrated-Adaptive Genetic Algorithms.- Simulating the Evolution of Ant Behaviour in Evaluating Nest Sites.- Evolving Evolutionary Algorithms Using Multi Expression Programming.- Modelling Artificial Ecosystem Selection: A Preliminary Investigation.- Measuring Self-Organization via Observers.- General Framework for Evolutionary Activity.- Developing and Testing Methods for Microarray Data Analysis Using an Artificial Life Framework.- Approaching Virtual Organism by PheGe.- Robustness to Damage of Biological and Synthetic Networks.- An Agent-Based Approach to Routing in Communications Networks with Swarm Intelligence.- Biomorphs Implemented as a Data and Signals Cellular Automaton.- Robotics and Autonomous Agents.- Analyzing the Performance of "Winner-Take-All" and "Voting-Based" Action Selection Policies within the Two-Resource Problem.- Are There Representations in Embodied Evolved Agents? Taking Measures.- Evolving Fractal Gene Regulatory Networks for Robot Control.- Explorations of Task-Dependent Visual Morphologies in Competitive Co-evolutionary Experiments.- Optimal Morphology of a Biologically-Inspired Whisker Array on an Obstacle-Avoiding Robot.- Phase Transitions in Self-Organising Sensor Networks.- Artificial Metabolism: Towards True Energetic Autonomy in Artificial Life.- An Imitation Game for Emerging Action Categories.- Multi-agent Model of Biological Swarming.- Visually Guided Physically Simulated Agents with Evolved Morphologies.- The Robot in the Swarm: An Investigation into Agent Embodiment within Virtual Robotic Swarms.- Building a Hybrid Society of Mind Using Components from Ten Different Authors.- Requirements for Getting a Robot to Grow up.- Coevolving Communication and Cooperation for Lattice Formation Tasks.- Evolving Aggregation Behaviors in a Swarm of Robots.- Low-Level Visual Homing.- Controlling a Simulated Khepera with an XCS Classifier System with Memory.- Collective Decision-Making and Behaviour Transitions in Distributed Ad Hoc Wireless Networks of Mobile Robots: Target-Hunting.