No matter what your perspective is, what your goals are, or how experienced you are, Artificial Life research is always a learning experience. The variety of phe nomena that the people who gathered in Lausanne reported and discussed for the fifth time since 1991 at the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL) has not been programmed, crafted, or assembled by analytic design. It has evolved, emerged, or appeared spontaneously from a process of artificial evolution, se- organisation, or development. Artificial Life is a field where biological and artificial sciences meet and blend together, where the dynamics of biological life are reproduced in the memory of computers, where machines evolve, behave, and communicate like living organ isms, where complex life-like entities are synthesised from electronic chromo somes and artificial chemistries. The impact of Artificial Life in science, phi losophy, and technology is tremendous. Over the years the synthetic approach has established itself as a powerful method for investigating several complex phenomena of life. From a philosophical standpoint, the notion of life and of in telligence is continuously reformulated in relation to the dynamics of the system under observation and to the embedding environment, no longer a privilege of carbon-based entities with brains and eyes. At the same time, the possibility of engineering machines and software with life-like properties such as evolvability, self-repair, and self-maintainance is gradually becoming reality, bringing new perspectives in engineering and applications.
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Keynote Lectures.- From Fertilized Eggs to Complex Organisms: Models of Biological Pattern Formation.- Fables of Cyberspace: Tapeworms, Horses, and Mountains.- Cognitive Teleportation and Situated Embodiment.- Testing Gaia Theory with Artificial Life.- Epistemology.- Testing for Emergence in Artificial Life.- Are Romance Novels Really Alive? A Discussion of the Supple Adaptation View of Life.- Evolutionary Dynamics.- How Symbiosis Can Guide Evolution.- Adaptability of Darwinian and Lamarckian Populations toward an Unknown New World.- Requirements for Immortal ALife to Exterminate Mortal ALife in One Finite, Heterogeneous Ecosystem.- Error Thresholds and Their Relation to Optimal Mutation Rates.- Are Artificial Mutation Biases Unnatural?.- Evolving Mutation Rates for the Self-Optimisation of Genetic Algorithms.- Statistical Reasoning Strategies in the Pursuit and Evasion Domain.- An Evolutionary Method Using Crossover in a Food Chain Simulation.- On Self-Reproduction and Evolvability.- Some Techniques for the Measurement of Complexity in Tierra.- A Generic Neutral Model for Quantitative Comparison of Genotypic Evolutionary Activity.- A Comparative Analysis of Biodiversity Measures.- Evolution of Differentiated Expression Patterns in Digital Organisms.- Species Formation in Evolving Finite State Machines.- Genetic Code Degeneracy: Implications for Grammatical Evolution and Beyond.- Coevolutionary Dynamics of a Multi-population Genetic Programming System.- The Evolution of Computation in Co-evolving Demes of Non-uniform Cellular Automata for Global Synchronisation.- Evolutionary Cybernetics.- Exploiting the Power of Sensory-Motor Coordination.- Evolution of Neural Controllers with Adaptive Synapses and Compact Genetic Encoding.- Synthetic Approaches to Neurobiology: Review and Case Study in the Control of Anguiliform Locomotion.- Replicating Experiments in "Detour Behavior" with Artificially Evolved Robots: An A-Life Approach to Comparative Psychology.- Studying Animals through Artificial Evolution: The Cricket Case.- Evolving Behavioural Choice: An Investigation into Herrnstein's Matching Law.- Modeling of an Early Evolutionary Stage of the Cnidarian Nervous System and Behavior.- Spontaneous Evolution of Command Neurons, Place Cells and Memory Mechanisms in Autonomous Agents.- Modularity in Evolved Artificial Neural Networks.- Framsticks: Towards a Simulation of a Nature-Like World, Creatures and Evolution.- Evolving Visual Feature Detectors.- Evolutionary Design of Mobile Robot Behaviors for Action-Based Environment Modeling.- Bio-inspired Robotics and Autonomous Agents.- On the Dynamics of Robot Exploration Learning.- Artificial Autonomy in the Natural World: Building a Robot Predator.- Behaviour Adaption on Behavior-Based Controller for Brachiation Robot.- Wet Artificial Brains: Towards the Chemical Control of Robot Motion by Reaction-Diffusion and Excitable Media.- A Neural Structure for Learning by Imitation.- A Neural Model for the Visual Navigation and Planning of a Mobile Robot.- Progressive Construction of Compound Behavior Controllers for Autonomous Robots Using Temporal Information.- A Visualization Tool for the Mini-Robot Khepera: Behavior Analysis and Optimization.- Towards UAV Nap-of-the-Earth Flight Using Optical Flow.- On Bots and Bacteria: Ontology Independent Embodiment.- Populating the Virtual Worlds with Interactive Perceptive Virtual Actors.- Level of Autonomy for Virtual Human Agents.- Emotional Disorders in Autonomous Agents ?.- Integrating Unsupervised Learning, Motivation and Action Selection in an A-life Agent.- Can Computers Have Sentiments? The Case of Risk Aversion and Utility for Wealth.- Self-Replication, Self-Maintenance, and Gene Expression.- Towards Robust Bio-inspired Circuits: The Embryonics Approach.- Designing a Simulation Model of a Self-Maintaining Cellular System.- Design Patterns for an Object-Oriented Computational Chemistry.- Model of Self-Replicating Cell Capable of Self-Maintenance.- Evolution at the Origins of Life: Modelling Simple Persistent Replicating Objects.- A Simulation of Life Using a Dynamic Core Memory Partitioned by Membrane Data.- Molecular Evolution in Time-Dependent Environments.- Evolution to Complexity: Replication, Elongation and Assembly in an RNA World.- Evolution of Multispecificity in an Immune Network.- Laziness + Sensitivity + Mobility = Structure.- Self-Repairing Multicellular Hardware: A Reliability Analysis.- Arithmetic Operations on Self-Replicating Cellular Automata.- Dynamics of Gene Expression in an Artificial Genome - Implications for Biological and Artificial Ontogeny.- Parameter Optimization in Hierarchical Structures.- A Model of Axis Determination for the Drosophila Wing Disc.- Identifying Gene Regulatory Networks from Time Series Expression Data by in silico Sampling and Screening.- Societies and Collective Behaviour.- Simulating the Evolution of Artifacts.- The Evolution of Non-reciprocal Altruism.- A Little More than Kind and Less than Kin: The Unwarranted Use of Kin Selection in Spatial Models of Communication.- An Evolutionary Simulation Model of Social Learning about Food by Norway Rats.- Effects of Cohesiveness on Inter-sexual Dominance Relationships and Spatial Structure among Group-Living Virtual Entities.- Simplicity Rules the Roost: Exploring Birdbrain Parental Investment Heuristics.- Imitation and Cooperation in Coupled Dynamical Recognizers.- Emergence of Adaptive Society with Competitive Selfish Agents.- Dynamical Systems Game.- High Speed Hardware Computation of Co-evolution Models.- A Probabilistic Model for Understanding and Comparing Collective Aggregation Mechanisms.- Exploiting Domain Physics: Using Stigmergy to Control Cluster Building with Real Robots.- Adaptive Exploration of a Dynamic Environment by a Group of Communicating Robots.- Task Fulfilment and Temporal Patterns of Activity in Artificial Ant Colonies.- Formalizing the Ant Algorithms in Terms of Reinforcement Learning.- Using Competing Ant Colonies to Solve k-way Partitioning Problems with Foraging and Raiding Strategies.- On Improving Clustering in Numerical Databases with Artificial Ants.- Communication and Language.- Ants War with Evolutive Pheromone Style Communication.- Sexual Signalling in an Artificial Population: When Does the Handicap Principle Work?.- Modeling the Evolution of Communication: From…