Norman Packard
European Center for Living Technology
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
A new research forum has been created for research on open-endedness and open-ended
evolution. The current location of the forum is http://openended.protolife.org.
The motivation for a forum on open-endedness began with the series of workshops on OpenEnded Evolution, starting with OEE1 at York, and continuing in subsequent artificial life
conferences. The workshops have always been a vibrant source of scientific interaction; this
forum seeks to extend the conversation to an open-ended virtual domain.
The primary goal of the forum is to foster research on open-endedness and open-ended
evolution. It seeks to provide research functionalities that are complementary to conventional
research tools: (i) literature aggregation across all publication channels, with easy access to
Google citation tools for each publication, and with community curation via tagging of a
publication’s relevance to different research areas; (ii) model aggregation, a collection of links to
all models that seem to have rich enough evolutionary dynamics to be open-ended, with links to
source code repositories, to enable easy reproducibility as well as extension of published results;
(iii) analytics aggregation, a collection of analytics that are designed to apply across different
modeling platforms, the only way to enable scientific cross-model comparison; and (iv) to
provide a new form of interactivity for scientific communication, to enable online conversations
on research threads by posting responses to published works on a much faster time-scale than the
usual journal publication cycle, including subsequent questions and observations, follow up
work, and links to other relevant work.