Editorial: Artificial Life

Since its inception in the 1980s, Artificial Life has been an interdisciplinary field of science focused on abstracting the essential features and dynamics of living systems in order to create artificial, life-like systems. The idea of C. Langton to study “life as it could be” is now not as eccentric and extravagant as at the beginning more than twenty years ago. To some extent the studied topics have reached mainstream research, for instance as part of systems biology. On the other hand, the main tool, computer simulations, has also become increasingly important in many fields including molecular biology and gave rise to new fields — computational cell biology, but also to the study of social systems by means of computer simulations. Artificial life, however, has not dissolved in these fields because it combines detailed research with conceptual work by asking the big questions for the principles underlying the functioning of living systems. The present topical section on Artificial Life offers contributions with topics ranging from the evolution of a species’ genome to division of labour among the members of a population. Rohlf and Winkler study an artificial genome model and show that robustness against both mutations and stochastic fluctuations of the environmental conditions can emerge in parallel. Evolutionary search in genetic space is also treated by Wrobel and Joachimczak as they a model development of multicellular organisms. Interaction and communication between cells can be important