Artificial Life is partly aimed at understanding the organisation and complexity of living processes. In this paper the concept of a historical process is discussed with the aim of providing a framework with which to approach diverse phenomena in organismic, ecological, and evolutionary contexts. A historical process is such, not because it is subject to contingencies, nor because it may be explained in historical terms, but because it presents a special relation between its dynamics and changes in its own conditions of realisation. Such processes may lead to durable spontaneous patterns and novelty. It is argued that such patterns can provide powerful explanatory tools and that Artificial Life simulation techniques are well fitted for their exploration. To different degrees of explicitness, the central theme of much of the work that currently goes under the rubric of Artificial Life (AL) is the understanding of processes that lead to innovations, transitions, and spontane...

An artificial chemistry is, in a broad sense, a man-made system which is similar to a chemical system. More precisely-- but not covering every type-- an artificial chemistry can be defined by a set of objects and a set of reaction rules which specify how the objects interact. The tutorial focuses on abstract artificial chemistries where there is no direct one-to-one relationship between artificial and real chemistry on the molecular/object and reaction/interaction level. In the first part the tutorial gives an introduction to the concept of artificial chemistries discussing two examples: a non-constructive and a constructive artificial chemistry. In the second part the tutorial will review current research activities along the following three application domains: modeling, information processing and optimization.

Doctor rerum naturalium