Natural Computing -- Ethological response to periodic stimulation in Chara and Brepharisma -- Adaptive path-finding and transport network formation by the amoeba-like organism Physarum -- Aggregate "Calculation" in Economic Phenomena: Distributions and Fluctuations -- Towards Co-evolution of Information, Life and Artifcial Life -- Harness the Nature for Computation -- Things Theory of Art Should Learn From Natural Computing -- Study on the use of Evolutionary Techniques for inference in Gene Regulatory Networks -- Reconstruction of Gene Regulatory Networks from Gene Expression Data using Decoupled Recurrent Neural Network Model -- Design and control of synthetic biological systems -- Satellite Symposium on Computational Aesthetics -- Preface-Natural Computing and Computational Aesthetics -- The Significance of Natural Computing for Considering Computational Aesthetics of Nature -- Perceiving the Gap: asynchronous coordination of plural algorithms and disconnected logical types in ambient space -- Aesthetic Aspects of Technology-mediated Self-awareness Experiences.

Open Access

This book contains the joint proceedings of the Winter School of Hakodate (WSH) 2011 held in Hakodate, Japan, March 15-16, 2011, and the 6th International Workshop on Natural Computing (6th IWNC) held in Tokyo, Japan, March 28-30, 2012, organized by the Special Interest Group of Natural Computing (SIG-NAC), the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI). This volume compiles refereed contributions to various aspects of natural computing, ranging from computing with slime mold, artificial chemistry, eco-physics, and synthetic biology, to computational aesthetics.              .