Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life

While the subtitle says Artificial Life, the contents are actually only a timid step in that direction. The book came out in 1992 and even now in 2008/9, we are still far from any "true" artificial life. Instead, the book's papers are on more limited topics. Like related to neural networks implementing vision. Or on genetic algorithms and programming. A bunch of papers are in robotics. Describing experiments using electromechanical devices with various control algorithms, for tasks like walking. One paper is off on a different tangent. It looks at dynamics of artificial markets, where there are multiple software agents doing buys and sells. A possible ecology of agents and their behaviour is mooted.