Artificial Life Suggested Literature Martin F. Krafft

• Levy, S. (1989) "Artificial Life"
  This book is a quick read and a great introduction to artificial life. It combines something of the science, the personalities and the history of this field.
• Sigmund, K. (1995) "Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior" Penguin.
  Fun and entertaining read. A few areas are pulled together: Complexity in population dynamics, game theory as applied to natural selection and self-reproducing automata.
• Flake, G.W. (2000) "The Computational Beauty of Nature" MIT Press. USA.
  In this book Gary William Flake develops in depth the simple idea that recurrent rules can produce rich and complicated behaviors. Distinguishing "agents" (e.g., molecules, cells, animals, and species) from their interactions (e.g., chemical reactions, immune system responses, sexual reproduction, and evolution), Flake argues that it is the computational properties of interactions that account for much of what we think of as "beautiful" and "interesting.
• Mitchell, M. (1998) "An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms" MIT Press. USA.
  This book covers background, history, and motivation of GAs. It selects informative examples of applications and discusses the use of genetic algorithms in scientific models. Furthermore it gives a good account of the status of the theory of genetic algorithms.
• Goldberg, D. (1989) "Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization and Machine Learning" Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.
  At the beginning of the book you will find a nice intro of GA, some comparison with other techniques, a mathematical foundation and some fields of application. Then you get into the real stuff. Coding (in Pascal) of the basic structures of GA and some more sophisticated, like: scaling fitness, inversion, diploid cells etc... there is also a step-by-step simulation to make you comprehend how the GA really works.
• Camzine, S., Deneubourg, J., Franks, N.R., Sneyd, J., Theraulaz, G., and Bonabeau, E. (2001) "Self-Organization in Biological System" Princeton University Press, New Jersey, USA.