Lecture Artificial Life (2V+2Ü) (MA-INF 4201)

Dr. Nils Goerke

Mondays 8:15 - 9:45

Lecture hall: III.03a, LBH Building, Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 144

Results from the Resit-Examination are in BASIS

Exam inspection is possible by direct appointment with N.Goerke.

Link to the Exercises

Content :

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.

Voluntary Exercises and Assignment sheets:

Wer offer voluntary exercises to intensify the work with the research topics presented in the lecture. You will get weekly paper-and-pencil assignments that are designed to be worked on in two person groups and completed within one week. You should 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 voluntary for this module in Summer 2017.
In order to receive feedback for the assignments, a student should be present during the next tutorial to discuss and present the assignments.

Written Examination:

There will be a 100 minutes written examination, covering all topics from the lecture and the assignment sheets. In general, working carefully on the assignments is a good preparation for the exam. 

Literature:

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.