[alife] CFP: First International Workshop on the Evolution of Physical Systems

[john rieffel]

Call For Papers:

Workshop on the Evolution of Physical Systems

to be held as part of
the 13th International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of
Systems (ALIFE13)
East Lansing MI, USA
Thursday July 19, 2012

Rodney Brooks's statement that "the world is its own best model" is
particularly true in the context of genetic algorithms, where novel
solutions to problems are often discovered by exploiting the substrate
of evolution. We use the term Evolution of Physical Systems (EPS) to
refer to evolutionary algorithms which occur entirely in real-world
physical substrates rather than in simulation. The term encompasses
both parallel Embodied Evolution (Watson et al., 2002), in which
evolution is distributed across a population of robots, as well as
Evolutionary Robotics (Floreano and Mondada, 1994) where evaluation is
serialized on a single robot. Notable examples of EPS occur across a
wide variety of systems, ranging from Robotics (Zykov et al., 2004)]
to FPGAs (Thompson, 1996) to 3D printers (Rieffel and Sayles, 2010).
Although EPS comes at a cost (the speed of the real world, unlike
CPUs, does not follow Moore's Law), by definition it avoids the
"reality gap" imposed by simulation, and has produced novel and
tangeable real-world results. Regardless of application or method, all
implementations of EPS are bound by many of the same constraints and
technical challenges.

The aim of this half-day single-track workshop is to bring together
researchers who are currently involved in the Evolution of Physical
Systems, as well as those interested in the technique, in order to
share ideas and innovations. As the frontiers of artificial life move
from the computer to the petri dish, the Evolution of Physical Systems
offers to provide inroads into domains which are otherwise impossible
to simulate.

Important Dates:
* Submission Deadline: Friday March 23
* Acceptance Notification: Monday April 2
* Camera Ready Deadline: Monday, April 9

For more details, please see:

http://cs.union.edu/~rieffelj/EPS-Workshop/