Introduction to the ECAL 2017 Special Issue

ECAL 2017, the Fourteenth European Conference on Artificial Life, was held in Lyon, France, September 4–8, 2017, hosted by the National Institute for Applied Sciences of Lyon (INSA Lyon) and by Inria Rhône-Alpes. Since the first ECAL in 1991, the conference has been the main international event of the International Society for Artificial Life (http://alife.org/) in odd-numbered years, alternating with ALife, the International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. The year 2017 marked the 30th anniversary of the first Artificial Life Workshop, held at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987. That year also happened to be the final meeting of ECAL, this series of fourteen conferences held in Paris, Brussels, Granada, Brighton, Lausanne, Prague, Dortmund, Canterbury, Lisbon, Budapest, Taormina, York, and finally Lyon. But this closure was not an end, since the two alternating conferences are now merged into a single event, held every year....