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

Dr. Nils Goerke

Mondays 8:15 - 9:45 HS7 and 12:15 -13:45 HS7

Lecture hall HS7 and HS 7, HSZ, Campus Poppelsdorf

The 2nd term, 12:15 - 13:45, is in HS 7 and is identical to the first term

Start: Monday 9. April 2018, 8:15

Link to the Exercises

Exam Inspection Dates:

Thursday 30.8.2018, 14:00 - 15:00, Room 0.011

Friday 31.8.2018, 9:00 - 10:00, Room 0.011

Monday 3.9.2018, 11:00 - 12:00, Room 0.011


Please be sure that you valid identity documents (with foto) with you.

Exam Dates:

Resit-Exam inspection by appointment

Resit-Exam results are in BASIS

Remark :

Due to the large number of students interested in that lecture, we decided to offer the lecture twice a week.
The second term, Mo 12-14, will be identical to the first term Mo 8-10.

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.

Mandatory Assignment sheets and Exercises groups:

The exercises are arranged 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. Your results of the assignments shall be presented and discussed during the exercise group to practice and improve your oral presentation skills. You must be capable of presenting your solutions during the exercise groups to receive the respective points. The paper and pencil assignments are accompanied by small programming tasks to be completed using individually implemented programms and stat of the art simulation tools.
You will need to reach half of the possible points from the programming and paper and pencil assignments, and you will have to explain a minimum of two assignments during the exercises to be admitted to the examination.

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.