Post-Workshop Information

Videos of all presentations and discussion sessions from OEE3 are now available on a YouTube playlist. See the schedule below for direct links to videos of individual talks and PDFs of all presented papers.

Following the OEE3 we organised a two-part special issue on Open-Ended Evolution in the Artificial Life journal. These were published in 2019 as issue 25(1) and 25(2) of the journal.

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Overview

Following the success of our first two workshops (OEE1, OEE2), the Third Workshop on Open-Ended Evolution (OEE3) will take place at the ALIFE 2018 conference in Tokyo, Japan on 25 July 2018.

From the first experiments with digital evolution in the 1950s to the increasingly sophisticated simulations of the present day, the concept of open-ended evolution (OEE) has been a central concern for Artificial Life researchers. Recent years have seen a massive renewed interest in the topic, as demonstrated by the rising attendance at the first two workshops and by the success of the OEE1 Workshop Report published in the Artificial Life journal (where it is currently the most read article over the last 12 months by a long margin). The excitement in the field has been well summarised in a recent article by OEE researchers Kenneth O. Stanley, Joel Lehman and Lisa Soros.

Building upon this momentum, the OEE3 workshop will be a launchpad for a special issue of the Artificial Life journal. We will accept extended abstract submissions and full paper submissions for the workshop, and will invite authors of selected contributions to expand their work for submission to the special issue. All submissions should refer to the observable behavioral hallmarks listed in section 3 of the OEE1 Workshop Report published in the Artificial Life journal, whether reporting progress on behavioral hallmarks, hypothesized requirements (mechanisms) or empirical demonstrations.

Topics of Interest

The goal of the OEE3 workshop is to build upon the outcomes of OEE1 and OEE2 by discussing recent progress on the following key issues:

• Behavioral hallmarks of systems undergoing OEE
• Hypothesized requirements (mechanisms) for systems to undergo OEE
• Empirical demonstrations of hallmarks or requirements of OEE in models or natural systems

Contributions on OEE perspectives are encouraged from all three of the major branches of ALife: simulation, wet, and robotic. As previously, the workshop will emphasize precise, operational, quantitative, empirical definitions of hallmarks and requirements for OEE, and will presume that there could be more than one interesting and important kind of OEE. We also encourage critical reflections about all these topics.