The main aim of this summer school is to provide students with cutting-edge knowledge on increasingly important themes like: artificial life, self-organization in decentralized systems, adaptation and methods using evolutionary computing. On a theoretical level this is realized by a series of lectures by experts from various domains. To provide participants with hands-on experience a programming task will be presented in which teams of participants can implement these theories and strategies. The main theme of this task is generating a smart social system of agents; a collectively trying to solve a given task.

The software environment used during this summer school is BREVE, a 3d simulation environment for multi-agent simulations and artificial life. One of the main advantages of BREVE is that it combines a relatively easy programming environment with spectacular 3d-graphics. In the spirit of collective intelligence, we will provide a trophy for the group that completes the task in the most successful way: the DECOI-trophy 2006. Since the time for this task is limited, it is vital that participants have some programming experience. The DECOI organization will provide both a general agent, a basic set of interaction protocols and a 'world' in which the task has to be performed. Participants have the option to already work on their system before the workshop; the necessary files will be available on the website.
In the period after the summer school, the proceedings of both the theoretical and the practical parts are presented on Internet. This means that lectures as well as the agents developed by the teams will be available for further research and publication.

We will upload a basic agent setup in BREVE, so participants can already get acquainted with BREVE and start developing ideas.

More info can be found here.