Overview

Following the success of the First Workshop on Open-Ended Evolution (OEE1) at the ECAL 2015 conference, the Second Workshop on Open-Ended Evolution (OEE2) will take place at the ALIFE XV conference in Cancún, Mexico on Monday 4 July 2016.

From the first experiments with digital evolution in the 1950s to the increasingly sophisticated simulations of the present day, the concept of open-ended evolution (OEE) has been a central concern for Artificial Life researchers.

The first workshop closed with a better appreciation of what remains to be learned about open-ended evolution, and a clearer picture of the most important open research questions, as set out in the OEE1 Workshop Report.

Topics of Interest

The goal of the workshop is to build upon the outcomes of OEE1 by discussing recent progress on the following key issues:

• Behavioral hallmarks of systems undergoing OEE
• Hypothesized requirements (mechanisms) for systems to undergo OEE
• Empirical demonstrations of hallmarks or requirements of OEE in models or natural systems

The workshop will emphasize precise, operational, quantitative, empirical definitions of hallmarks and requirements for OEE, and will presume that there could be more than one interesting and important kind of OEE. We also encourage critical reflections about all these topics.

After the workshop, authors of selected workshop presentations will be invited to write up and submit their results to a peer-reviewed special issue on OEE to be published in the journal Artificial Life.