ECAL 2017, the Fourteenth European Conference on Artificial Life, was held in Lyon, France, September 4–8, 2017, hosted by the National Institute for Applied Sciences of Lyon (INSA Lyon) and by Inria Rhône-Alpes. Since the first ECAL in 1991, the conference has been the main international event of the International Society for Artificial Life (http://alife.org/) in odd-numbered years, alternating with ALife, the International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. The year 2017 marked the 30th anniversary of the first Artificial Life Workshop, held at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987. That year also happened to be the final meeting of ECAL, this series of fourteen conferences held in Paris, Brussels, Granada, Brighton, Lausanne, Prague, Dortmund, Canterbury, Lisbon, Budapest, Taormina, York, and finally Lyon. But this closure was not an end, since the two alternating conferences are now merged into a single event, held every year. The 2017 meeting gathered two hundred participants, coming from Europe of course, but also from America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. Seven plenary talks were presented, covering a wide range of artificial life topics, related to the conference theme—“Create, play, experiment, discover: Revealing the experimental power of virtual worlds.” Indeed, one goal of the conference was to investigate the place of the experimental approaches within the artificial life field, both in terms of how we can use experimental results from chemistry, biology, or social sciences, and in terms of how we experiment with our own artefacts. Six workshops were held during the conference, on topics ranging from agency in the physical sciences to living architecture, not forgetting the evolution of physical systems, morphogenic engineering, synthetic biology and embodied artificial intelligence, and social learning and cultural evolution. In addition to the well-established ISAL School, nine tutorials gave the participants the opportunity to learn about MABE (modular-agent-based evolution), Empirical (to build artificial life systems for the web), FLAME GPU (to simulate complex systems), Avida-ED (a GUI implementation of Avida for educational use), evolutionary game theory, evolution of neural networks, evolutionary robotics with real hardware, evolution in the cloud, and digital coevolution. The 64 contributed talks (for a total of 131 submissions) and 23 contributed posters covered all the topics of artificial life, the most represented being (i) evolutionary dynamics, (ii) complex dynamical systems and networks, (iii) perception, cognition, and behavior, and (iv) bio-inspired robotics and embodied systems. The whole proceedings [1] are available in open access at MIT Press (http://cognet.mit.edu/journal/ecal2017). This special issue of the Artificial Life journal brings

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ECAL 2017 特刊简介

ECAL 2017，即第十四届欧洲人工生命会议，于 2017 年 9 月 4 日至 8 日在法国里昂举行，由里昂国家应用科学研究所（INSA Lyon）和 Inria Rhône-Alpes 主办。自 1991 年第一届 ECAL 以来，该会议一直是国际人工生命学会 (http://alife.org/) 在奇数年的主要国际活动，与 ALife，合成与模拟国际会议交替生命系统。2017 年是 1987 年在洛斯阿拉莫斯国家实验室举办的第一届人工生命研讨会 30 周年。 那一年也恰好是 ECAL 的最后一次会议，这一系列的十四次会议分别在巴黎、布鲁塞尔、格拉纳达、布莱顿、洛桑、布拉格、多特蒙德、坎特伯雷、里斯本、布达佩斯、陶尔米纳、约克，最后是里昂。但这并不是结束，因为两个交替的会议现在合并为一个单一的事件，每年举行一次。2017 年的会议聚集了 200 名与会者，他们当然来自欧洲，也有来自美洲、亚洲、非洲和大洋洲。七场全体会议进行了演讲，涵盖了广泛的人工生命主题，与会议主题相关——“创造、玩耍、实验、发现：揭示虚拟世界的实验力量”。事实上，会议的一个目标是研究实验方法在人工生命领域中的地位，包括我们如何使用化学、生物学或社会科学的实验结果，以及我们如何用我们的实验方法进行实验。自己的文物。会议期间举办了六场研讨会，主题范围从物理科学中的能动性到活体建筑，不要忘记物理系统的进化、形态发生工程、合成生物学和具身人工智能，以及社会学习和文化进化。除了完善的 ISAL 学校，九个教程让参与者有机会了解 MABE（基于模块化代理的进化）、Empirical（为网络构建人工生命系统）、FLAME GPU（模拟复杂系统） , Avida-ED（用于教育用途的 Avida 的 GUI 实现）、进化博弈论、神经网络的进化、具有真实硬件的进化机器人、云中的进化和数字协同进化。64 场投稿演讲（共 131 篇投稿）和 23 篇投稿海报涵盖了人工生命的所有主题，最具代表性的是 (i) 进化动力学，(ii) 复杂的动力系统和网络，(iii) 感知、认知和行为，以及 (iv) 仿生机器人和具身系统。整个会议记录 [1] 可在 MIT Press (http://cognet.mit.edu/journal/ecal2017) 上公开获取。本期《人工生命》杂志特刊带来了