ALife XI: Information in Complex Systems and Artificial Life

[Mikhail.Prokopenko]

Hi,

 

A number of themes have been proposed for Artificial Life XI (The Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems), to be held 5th - 8th August 2008, Winchester, UK:

 

One of them is motivated by IDSO:

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Information in Complex Systems and Artificial Life

http://alifexi.wikispaces.com/Theme+-+Information

 

One of the hallmarks of Artificial Life scenarios is the vast multitude of models and scenarios of different nature, character and quality. On the one hand, this richness defines the field which attempts to capture certain aspects pertinent to the origins and maintenance of living systems. On the other hand, it makes it difficult to compare models and to identify common quantifiable and transferable principles across the scenarios.

 

In this situation, interest has increasingly turned to information (in the quantitative sense of Shannon) in various incarnations to address this problem. Various information-theoretic quantities have served to characterize complexity of dynamical systems, Markovian processes, self-organization, emergence, neural processing power, and more. Moreover, there is mounting evidence that biological systems tend to operate at near-optimal information processing capacities. This suggests that biological information processing on all levels may be better understood in terms of information optimization principles (such as e.g., Infomax); this effect may derive from principles of parsimony. The relevance of these observations, however, is that not only it provides a quantitative approach to model biological information processing, but that it also promises to abstract away "implementation" details of the biological substrate (or its Alife models) while still extracting those aspects of information processing that are essential for its success.

 

In the last years, a number of novel techniques have been developed that allow to address increasingly intricate aspects of Alife scenarios, such as the characterization of relevant information (e.g., via the information bottleneck principle), the flow of information through an information processing unit and the perception-action (sensorimotor) loop, the formulation of universal utilities and fitness functions based on informational principles, the identification and quantification of modularity, and more.

 

In this themed session, we are looking for contributions that will address issues including, but not limited to:

 

Analysis: scenarios analysed/interpreted using information theoretic tools.
Modelling: scenarios involving information-theoretic quantities for their formulation.
Concepts/Methods: novel information-theoretic concepts, methods and approaches for Alife scenarios.
Alternatives: expressive quantitative alternatives to (Shannon-type) information-theoretic modelling.
Vision: far-reaching and visionary approaches, applications, scenarios and perspective for the use of information-theoretic and related approaches to model, understand, and develop Alife systems, both for the understanding of biological systems as well as the development of artificial ones.

 

Proposers: Daniel Polani, Chrystopher Nehaniv and Mikhail Prokopenko
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Please have a look.

 

Thanks,

Mikhail

 

 

[Daniel Polani]

Hi all,

since there were a few questions, a clarifying follow-up to Mikhail's
posting about our themed session on "Information in Complex Systems
and Artificial Life":

The themed session is not a separate workshop/tutorial event, but runs
as a session of the regular Alife Conference. So, to participate in
that session, submit a paper (or abstract, see the Alife XI website
http://www.alifexi.org/) and note that it is directed to that themed
session.

In particular, papers submitted are fully peer-reviewed conference
papers, and among the Alife conference papers the 10-20 best will be
selected for invitation to submit to the Alife journal.

We gladly await your submissions,

Mikhail, Chrystopher, and Daniel