Link to the Exercises
This lecture is part of the intelligent systems track of the master programme "Computer Science".
The lecture gives an overview over the most prominent aspects of artificial life research
from the foundations, including strong and weak artificial life, via the most prominent topics of artificial life to
the state of the art and to current applications.
The following topics will be presented and discussed in detail:
Cellular automata, Conway's "Game of Life", mechanisms to structure development and pattern formation,
basics of nonlinear systems, Lindenmeyer Systems, evolutionary methods, and genetic algorithms, reinforcement learning,
adaptive behaviour, self-organising criticality, swarming behaviour, swarm intelligence,
ant algorithms, particle swarm optimization.
Wer offer exercises to intensify the work with the research topics presented in the lecture.
You will get mandatory weekly paper-and-pencil assignments that are designed to
be worked on in two person groups and completed within one week.
You must be capable of presenting, and explaining your results of the assignments during
the exercise groups.
The paper and pencil assignments are accompanied by small programming
tasks to be completed using state of the art simulation tools and
individually implemented programms.
Exercise participation is mandatory for this module.
In order to receive credit for an assignment, a student must be present during the entire next
tutorial in order to present, discuss, and receive feedback for the assignment tasks.
there will be a 100 minutes written examination, covering all topics fr4om the lecture and the assignment sheets.
To be admitted to the exam you will need 50 percent of the points from the assigmnent sheets.
In general, working carefully on the assignments is a good preparation for the exam.
Unfortunately no text-book is at the moment available for this module.
Most necessary literature will be named during the lecture.
C. Adami: Introduction to Artificial Life, Springer-Verlag New York, 1998
D. Floreano and C. Mattiussi: Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence, The MIT Press, 2008.
E.Bonabeau, M.Dorigo, G.Theraulaz: Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems, Oxford University Press.
Universität Bonn, Institute for Computer Science, Departments: I, II, III, IV, V, VI