Abstract
Artificial Life (hereafter ALife) is an interdisciplinary research field that has the purpose of gaining a better understanding of biological life by artificially synthesizing simple and novel forms of life, as well as reproducing lifelike properties of living systems. Synthesis of artificial cells, simulation of large-scale biological networks, intelligent use of exponentially growing amounts of biochemical data, exploitation of biological substrates for computation and control, and deployment of bioinspired engineering are just some of the main issues of ALife and nowadays are cutting-edge topics. ALife is at the intersection between a theoretical perspective, namely, the scientific explanations of different levels of life organization (e.g., molecules, compartments, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, societies, and collective and social phenomena) and advanced technological applications (bio-inspired algorithms and techniques for building up effective solutions such as in the fields of robotics, big data analysis, and computational medicine). This special issue presents the top six articles—revised and extended—that were presented at ECAL 2013, the twelfth European Conference on Artificial Life, which was held in Taormina, Sicily, Italy, September 2–6, 2013 (http://www.dmi.unict.it/ecal2013/). ECAL 2013 was a grand scientific celebration with hundreds of paper and poster presentations (for a total of 267 submissions, 10 workshops, 16 tracks, and more than 350 attendants) by leading scientists in the field, which have described an impressive array of results, ideas, technologies, and applications, thus showing the current state of the art of ALife. The aim of this special issue is to give an incentive for boosting interest and new ideas in designing life and lifelike processes at different levels of complexity. After a careful peer-review process, only the top six research manuscripts, extended and revised, of ECAL 2013 have been selected for inclusion in this special issue.
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