The Italian community in Artificial Life and Evolutionary computation has grown remarkably in recent years, and this book is the first broad collection of its major interests and achievements (including contributions from foreign countries). The contributions in Artificial Life as well as in Evolutionary Computation allow one to see the deep connections between the two fields. The topics addressed are extremely relevant for present day research in Artificial Life and in Evolutionary Computation, which include important contributions from very well-known researchers. The volume provides a very...

This volume describes our intellectual path from the physics of complex sys tems to the science of artificial cognitive systems. It was exciting to discover that many of the concepts and methods which succeed in describing the self organizing phenomena of the physical world are relevant also for understand ing cognitive processes. Several nonlinear physicists have felt the fascination of such discovery in recent years. In this volume, we will limit our discussion to artificial cognitive systems, without attempting to model either the cognitive behaviour or the nervous structure of humans or...