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.

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.