Nature's spectacular inventiveness, reflected in the enormous diversity of form and function displayed by the biosphere, is a feature of life that distinguishes living most strongly from nonliving. It is, therefore, not surprising that this aspect of life should become a central focus of artificial life. We have known since Darwin that the diversity is produced dynamically, through the process of evolution; this has led life's creative productivity to be called Open-Ended Evolution (OEE) in the field. This article introduces the second of two special issues on current research in OEE and provides an overview of the contents of both special issues. Most of the work was presented at a workshop on open-ended evolution that was held as a part of the 2018 Conference on Artificial Life in Tokyo, and much of it had antecedents in two previous workshops on open-ended evolution at artificial life conferences in Cancun and York. We present a simplified categorization of OEE and summarize progress in the field as represented by the articles in this special issue.

中文翻译：

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开放式进化概述：开放式进化 II 特刊的社论介绍

大自然惊人的创造力反映在生物圈所表现出的形式和功能的巨大多样性中，是生命的一个特征，它最能区分有生命的和无生命的。因此，生命的这一方面应该成为人工生命的中心焦点也就不足为奇了。自达尔文以来，我们就知道多样性是通过进化过程动态产生的；这导致生命的创造性生产力在该领域被称为开放式进化 (OEE)。本文介绍了当前 OEE 研究的两个专刊中的第二个，并概述了这两个专刊的内容。大部分工作是在作为 2018 年东京人工生命会议的一部分举行的开放式进化研讨会上提出的，在坎昆和约克举行的人工生命会议上，之前的两次关于开放式进化的研讨会上，其中的大部分内容都有前因。我们提出了 OEE 的简化分类，并总结了本特刊中文章所代表的该领域的进展。