Advances in artificial life ; 8th European Conference, ECAL 2005 , Canterbury, UK, September 5-9, 2005, Proceedings

The Artificial Life term appeared more than 20 years ago . Since then the area has developed dramatically, many researchersjoining enthusiastically and research groups sprouting everywhere.a conceptual track, where papers were judged on criteria like importance and/or novelty of the concepts proposed rather than the experimental / theoretical results, has been introduced this year. A conference on a theme as broad as Artificial Life is bound to be very di-verse, but a few tendencies emerged. First, fields like ‘Robotics and Autonomous Agents’ or ‘Evolutionary Computation’are still extremely active and keep onbringing a wealth of results to the A-Life community. Even there, however, new tendencies appear, like collective robotics, and more specifically self-assembling robotics, which represent now a large subsection. Second, new areas appear.‘Morphogenesis and Development’ which used to be the subject of only a fewpapers, is now one of the largest subsections, and seems to be on the brinkof becoming a field of its own. Finally, most classical themes of A-Life re-search like ‘Artificial Chemistry’, ‘Ant-Inspired Systems’, ‘Cellular Automata’,‘Self-Replication’, ‘Social Simulations’ or ‘Bio-realist Simulations’ are still goingstrong and are well represented within this volume.