ALIFE XII

 Artificial Life XII:
The 12 International Conference on the
Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems
th

This is the proceeding for the Artificial Life XII Conference (http://www.alife12.org/), hosted by
the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLinT) (http://www.sdu.dk/flint/) at University
of Southern Denmark, Odense, August 19-23, 2010. Twenty three years ago in September 1987, the first
Artificial Life Workshop was held at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the subsequent Alife workshops
and conferences have been hosted in the US eight times (Los Alamos 1987, Santa Fe 1990 & 1992, MIT 1994,
UCLA 1998, Reed 2000, Boston 2004), Japan once (Nara 1996), Australia once (Sydney 2002), England once
(Southampton 2008) and now in Denmark (Odense 2010).

What is different about Alife XII?
You may have noticed that we have switched sequence of the concepts “Simulation” and “Synthesis” in
the title of the conference to emphasize some changes within our community. First of all, the Alife XII
submissions consist of a significantly higher fraction of wet Alife papers than at any earlier Alife conference.
It is a pleasure to see how the communities from wet and soft Alife are increasingly engaging with each
other. These submissions are also congruent with a clearer view in the broader scientific community on how
we might create life either from scratch or through top-down design [1, 2, 3]. This trend is also reflected by
a number of recent international collaborations across the top-down and the bottom-up communities, often
sponsored under the title of synthetic biology.1
Living processes have been implemented and studied for many years in soft Alife systems (living processes
implemented on computers), but the emergence of replicating programs from noisy computational environments remain an open issue. Significant progress has also been made for life-like robotics systems, for
example through the development of polymorphic robots, where e.g. simple self-assembly, self-replication
as well as complex collective behavior now have been obtained [4, 5].
In general, we see more integration between wet, hard, soft, and mixed living systems both within the
Alife community and across the broader scientific and technological landscapes. This is in part captured
by the definition of emerging living technology which comprises all technological applications of living and
life-like processes at all levels [6].
As the Alife community inches closer to an understanding of life as a physical process by constructing
living processes, we are also increasingly assessing the technological implications of the ability to engineer
systems, whose power is based on the core features of life: robustness, adaptation, self-repair, self-assembly,
and self-replication, centralized and distributed intelligence, and evolution [7].
In the coming years, we will likely see an accelerated movement towards more life-like, living, and intelligent processes as well as their integration across many technologies to form new biology-technology
1
E.g., the European Science Foundation sponsored synthetics biology workshop on “Streamlined and synthetic
genomes”, November 16-17, 2009, Valencia, Spain. The Los Alamos National Laboratory sponsored synthetic biology workshop, June 28-29, 2010, Los Alamos NM, USA.

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ecologies, that also include human institutions. If implemented appropriately, these new systems, technologies, and organizations could become more in tune with the needs of human society and the natural dynamics
of the biosphere.
These developments are emerging from a knowledge convergence between a variety of sciences and
technologies which we, within the Alife community, may group into (i) wet carbon-chemistry-based systems, (ii) computational and robotics based, ICT (information and communications technology) systems, and
(iii) human organizations and institutions dominated by culture and human nature.
As part of the Alife XII program, we have scheduled a session “Looking backwards, looking forwards”
to address the scientific questions related to these developments. Ten years have passed since the last Alife
community status report [8, 9, 10], and we hope that this conference program can contribute to updating the
critical open Alife questions. The day after the conclusion of the Alife XII conference, we have a one-day
workshop for a similar discussion focused on the technological implications of Alife. Part of this discussion
will be open to the public [11].
We should also emphasize that after 23 years, a hallmark for Alife community is still its scientific breath
and inclusiveness. The Alife conferences clearly continue to act as a Big Tent, where scientists from many
different disciplines and domains meet to present results and exchange ideas. This unique community feature
has historically made the Alife community highly innovative, however it also makes peer review difficult
as scientific methods vary dramatically across the many domains and disciplines. This breath also causes
problems when papers need to be categorized into sessions as most papers in this volume could fit under
several of the conference themes.

Background for Alife XII
For Alife XII 156 out of well over than 200 contributions (papers and abstracts) were accepted in the peer
review process. These papers and abstracts represent authors from 34 countries and they consist of 152 (= 156
presentations - 4 plenary talks) contributed talks in four, and at times five, parallel sessions. All contributions
have 15 minutes for their presentation and five minutes for discussion. The contributed plenary talks have 40
minutes. Alife XII also has a vibrant Poster Session, which is a crucial component of the Conference.
In addition to the peer reviewed presentations, Alife XII has six Satellite Events, which are proposed and
organized by individuals and groups from the community. Traditionally, these workshops add an important
dimension to the Alife meetings due to their free format and often more exploratory topic selection. Often,
radically new ideas are presented in these workshops or tutorials on specific topics and explored in more
details than regular peer reviewed presentations allow.
In order to assemble the Alife XII conference program, we have harvested as much domain and expert
knowledge as reasonably possible. This process started well before the first call for papers with a call for
contributed themes, where we consulted the invited Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) for advice. The
Organizing Committee (OC) solicited the SAC, which effort we are deeply indebted for. The Alife XII SAC
consists of:
Chris Adami
Martyn Amos
Wolfgang Banzhaf
Mark Bedau
Jim Boncella
Liaohai Chen
Greg Chirikjian
David Deamer
Peter Dittrich

Pascale Ehrenfreund
Takashi Ikegami
Martin N. Jacobi
David Krakauer
Doron Lancet
Kristian Lindgren
Jerzy Maselko
John McCaskill
Chris Melhuish

Andrés Moya
Ole Mouritsen
Peter Nielsen
Norman Packard
Rolf Pfeifer
Vitor Dos Santos
Andrew Shreve
Ricard Solé
Richard Vaughan

The SAC together with the OC proposed a variety of conference themes and the SAC also took part in the
multiple conference announcements.

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Upon submission, authors were asked to attribute their submission to several of these conference themes.
In response to these preliminary assignments, the original themes were slightly revised to more closely match
the accepted contributions. A group of 18 track organizers were asked to vote for the contributions potentially
pertaining to their themes, and to suggest coherent sessions based on these submissions. This voting was
performed using online spreadsheets (Google documents). The Pareto front of the track organizer votes
identified few areas of strong overlap – mainly in the area of wet artificial life. For these areas, the session
assignment was done jointly by the responsible track organizers. At this stage 113 out of the 152 contributions
could be assigned to the unique highest bidder. The remaining 39 submissions with conflicting votes were
then assigned in a way that lead to the most consistent sessions. In only five cases, we overruled the bare
votes in favor of coherent session themes. However, it should be noted that many contributions fit well within
several of these themes due to the interdisciplinary character of the Alife community.
This collective intelligence process resulted in the following themes (with theme organizer names):
Chemical Self-Assembly and Complexity (Jerzy Maselko)
Origin of Life (Mark Dörr & Bruce Damer)
Bottom-up Synthetic Cells (Pierre-Alain Monnard)
Systems Biology (Luis Delaye)
Biological and Chemical Information Processing and Production (John McCaskill)
Artificial Chemistries (Wolfgang Banzhaf)
Minimal Cognition and Physical Intelligence (Martin Hanczyc)
Evolutionary Dynamics (Chris Adami)
Theoretical and Computational Frameworks (Peter Dittrich)
Complex Networks (Carlos Gershensen & Mikhail Prokopenko)
Ecology (Seth Bullock)
Collective Intelligence (Johan Bollen)
Emergent Engineering (Norman Packard)
Intelligence and Learning (Takashi Ikegami)
Robots (Kasper Støy)
Socio-Technical Systems (Kristian Lindgren)
Philosophy (Mark Bedau)
We have tried to organize the sequence of conference topics from lower to higher levels of organization with
a variety of methods themes sandwiched in between.
Four keynote presentations – by Christian de Duve, Tetsuya Yomo, John McCaskill, and Serge Kernbach –
provide overarching perspectives on the origins of life, artificial cells, the connection between biochemistry
and computational hardware and software as well as robotics, covering the classical wet, soft, and hard artificial life research areas. In addition to the invited keynote presentations, Alife XII also features contributed
plenary talks. Reviewers, theme organizers and the organizing committee jointly suggested candidates for
these presentations. Four plenary, contributed presentations were picked by the organizers to ensure an overall balanced conference program. Unfortunately, many other papers deserving to be highlighted as plenary
talks could not be accommodated.
The review process was conducted and coordinated utilizing the distributed online tool EasyChair
(http://www.easychair.org/), which the organizers can recommend for reviewing many conference paper and abstract submissions. We should stress that the assembly of the conference program would
have been impossible without the fantastic work of the 135 Alife XII submission reviewers. The OC is deeply
indebted to all of them and they are separately acknowledged on the next pages.
It is our belief that the resulting review process and conference program – a true child of bottom-up collective intelligence – benefited significantly from the participation of the many domain experts. It would have

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been very difficult to assemble a theme-based program using a traditional top-down approach. The bottomup process ensures a program organization, that reflects the highly diverse current activities within the Alife
community. The disadvantage of this collective intelligence based program assembly process is that more
time and effort is spend by more people.
We, the Alife XII OC, sincerely hope you will find these proceedings both useful and inspirational and that
you will enjoy the conference.
Harold Fellermann (Alife XII co-chair)
Mark Dörr
Martin Hanczyc
Lone Ladegaard Laursen (Alife XII administrative chair)
Sarah Maurer
Daniel Merkle (Alife XII EasyChair chair)
Pierre-Alain Monnard
Kasper Støy
Steen Rasmussen (Alife XII chair)

August 2010, Odense, Denmark.

References
[1] Rasmussen, S. et al. editors (2009). Protocells: Transitions from nonliving to living matter. MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA.
[2] D. Gibson et al. (2010). Creation of a bacterial cell controlled by a chemically synthesized genome Science,
329(5987):52–56.
[3] Bedau, M. A. et al. (2010). Life after the synthetic cell Nature, 465:422–424.
[4] Zykov, V. et al. (2005). Self-reproducing machines Nature, 435(7038):163–164
[5] Ieropoulos, I. et al. (2005). EcoBot-II: An artificial agent with a natural metabolism. Advanced Robotics Systems
2(4):295–300.
[6] Bedau, M. A. et al. (2010). Living Technology: Exploiting Life’s Principles in Technology. Artificial Life 16:89–97.
[7] Bedau, M. A. et al. editors (2010). Living technology: 5 Questions. Automatic Press, Copenhagen.
[8] Discussions: “Looking backwards, looking forwards” during the 7th Artificial Life Conference in Posrtland, Oregon,
USA. See also Bedau, M. A. et al. editors (2000). Artificial Life VII: Proceedings of the Seventh International
Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA.
[9] Bedau, M. A. et al. (2000). Open problems in artificial life Artificial Life 6:363.
[10] Rasmussen, S. et al. (2003). Collective intelligence of the artificial life community on its own successes, failures,
and future. Artificial Life, 9:207.
[11] http://science-society-policy.org/, see under events, August 24, 2010, “Putting people in the presence”.

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Program Committee
Andy Adamatzky, Chris Adami, Lee Altenberg, Martyn Amos, Claes Andersson, Takaya Arita, Jacob Axelsen, Carsten Baldauf, Wolfgang Banzhaf, Rafael
Barrio, Mark Bedau, Randall Beer, Luis Bettencourt, Tanmoy Bhattacharya,
Eleonora Bilotta, Jon Bird, Christian Blum, Johan Bollen, Josh Bongard, Seth
Bullock, Pedro Castillo, Sung-Bae Cho, Dominique Chu, Jeff Clune, Stirling Colgate, David Cornforth, Bruce Damer, Thomas Dandekar, Kerstin Dautenhahn,
Luis Delaye, Jordi Delgado, Peter Dittrich, Konrad Diwold, Marco Dorigo, Alan
Dorin, Mark Dörr, Rene Doursat, Bruce Edmonds, Harold Fellermann, Pietro
Speroni di Fenizio, Christoph Flamm, David Fogel, Rudolf Füchslin, Toni Gabaldón, Nic Geard, Philip Gerlee, Carlos Gershenson, Mario Giacobini, Martin
Hanczyc, Inman Harvey, Paulien Hogeweg, Paul Humphreys, Phil Husbands,
Tim Hutton, Hiroyuki Iizuka, Takashi Ikegami, Christian Jacob, Martin Jacobi,
Yi Jiang, George Kampis, Niles Lehman, Tom Lenaerts, Lukas Lichtensteiger,
Kristian Lidgren, Torbjörn Lundh, George Magoulas, Jerzy Maselko, Sarah E.
Maurer, John McCaskill, Barry McMullin, Juan Merelo, Daniel Merkle, Andrés
Moya, Pierre-Alain Monnard, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, Peter Nielson, Jason
Noble, Stefano Nolfi, Charles Ofria, Eckehard Olbrich, Naoki Ono, Ezequiel di
Paolo, Simone Pigolotti, Erich Prem, Makhail Prokopenko, Steen Rasmussen,
Tom Ray, Craig Reynolds, John Rieffel, Adam Rotaru-Varga, Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo,
Vı́tor dos Santos, Francisco C. Santos, Josep Sardanyés, Hiroki Sayama, Roberto
Serra, Ricard V. Solé, Susan Stepney, Kasper Støy, Hideaki Suzuki, Uwe Tangen,
Charles Taylor, Tim Taylor, Adrian Thompson, Vito Trianni, Soichiro Tsuda,
Elio Tuci, Kolbjorn Tunstrom, Jon Umerez, Edgar Vallejo, Richard Vaughan,
Gwenn Volkert, Richard Watson, Niek Wijngaards, Janet Wiles, Jon Wilkins,
Larry Yaeger, Lidia Yamamoto, Xin Yao, Tom Ziemke, Hans-Joachim Ziock

Additional Reviewers
Maribel G. Arenas, Joshua Auerbach, Alexandre Campo, Adam Davies, Pablo
Garcı́a-Sánchez, Onofrio Gigliotta, Alex Graudenzi, Arend Hintze, Ben Jones,
Wenjian Luo, Thomas Meyer, Rehan O’Grady, Gustavo Romero, Marta Santos,
Marco Villani

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