Preface

Traditionally, artificial evolution, complex systems, and artificial life were separate fields, each with its own research community, but we are now seeing increased intertwinement and hybridization among them. It is now hard to imagine any work in one of these areas that does not refer to techniques or theoretical results normally considered to belong to one of the other two. Evolution and complexity characterize both biological life and artificial life, whenever direct modeling of biological processes is pursued or populations of interacting artificial biologically inspired entities are created, from which complex behaviors can emerge and evolve. The latter consideration, besides offering a proof of the tight connections existing between these disciplines, also gives an idea of the breadth of the related topics of interest, and of the different study viewpoints, ranging from purely scientific and exploratory approaches aimed at verifying biological theories to technology-focused applied research aimed at solving difficult real-world problems raised by practical and industrial tasks. As a result of the hybridization between these disciplines, the same is happening to the corresponding research communities, and common conference tracks and workshops are being organized worldwide. We conceived the idea of editing a book to collect contributions offering a wide panoramic view of the opportunities that cooperation among the three disciplines can produce when we started organizing the fourth edition of WIVACE, the Italian Workshop on Evolutionary Computing and Artificial Life, which was held in Parma in February 2012. This edited book includes invited chapters from leading scientists in the fields of artificial life, complex systems, and evolutionary computing, aimed at authoritatively introducing readers to some of the main research topics that are not only shared by the three research fields, but that, in some cases, can only exist, thanks to the contribution of all three disciplines. The book also contains a selection of the best papers presented at WIVACE 2012, thoroughly revised and extended by the authors.