This special issue of Artificial Life journal presents some of the best papers of the Conference on Artificial Life ALIFE 2021, which was originally scheduled to be held in Prague, Czech Republic, on July 19–23. However, because of the COVID-19 pandemic and its repercussions, the ALIFE 2021 conference took place solely online (Figure 1). Nevertheless, it was a wonderful event with around 400 participants and a busy program that offered 9 keynote talks, 27 hours of 6 special sessions, almost 40 hours of 11 workshops, 5 tutorials, and 64 talks in parallel sessions. The organizing committee worked intensively to create a virtual conference that gave as much of a real conference atmosphere as possible, so there were also a virtual art gallery, virtual pubs, and virtual coffee rooms. The social program offered the documentary movie Solutions and a THEaiTRE project Can a Robot Write a Theatre Play? The...

You do not currently have access to this content.