Have been looking at the themes for the ALife XI conference. The main gist seems to be towards parallels with biology, such as consciousness rather than robotics or genetic algorithms. Apparently the former field used to be an aLife area but became so mainstream that it became its own field with conferences.
According to Inman Harvey, Alife is always associated as a maverick area with people doing weird stuff that falls outside exisiting categories, it is disputed whether these are even valid science! Apparently the reason for this is that when something useful emerges, such as GAs, it gets taken away from aLife and becomes its own “respectable” field.
Anyway as my paper is on GA’s and therefore does not fall clearly in any of the “maverick” thems I don’t have much hope it will accepted – except that Inman thinks it will be.
Filed under: Academic
