Homeostasis via chaos: implementing the uniselector as a dynamical system

The Eleventh International Conference on Artificial Life marks the twenty-first birthday of the conference series, which was founded in 1987 by Chris Langton at the Santa Fe Institute. As you might expect, over twenty-one years the community has grown, matured and stabilised around some key ideas, individuals and questions. However, while artificial life now, as then, continues to investigate the fundamental properties of living systems through simulating and synthesizing biological entities and processes in artificial media, there are signs that the field may be on the cusp of a second wave driven by new developments in molecular, cellular and systems biology, and renewed widespread interest in complex systems of many kinds