From The Santa Fe Institute, "Artificial Life: A Brief Definition" :
Introduction to Artificial Life
Biology is the scientific study of life - in principle anyway. In practice, biology is the scientific study of life on Earth based on carbon-chain chemistry. There is nothing in its charter that restricts biology to carbon-based life; it is simply that this is the only kind of life that has been available to study. Thus, theoretical biology has long faced the fundamental obstacle that it is impossible to derive general principles from single examples.
Without other examples, it is difficult to distinguish essential properties of life - properties that would be shared by any living system - from properties that may be incidental to life in principle, but which happen to be universal to life on Earth due solely to a combination of local historical accident and common genetic descent.
In order to derive general theories about life, we need an ensemble of instances to generalize over. Since it is quite unlikely that alien lifeforms will present themselves to us for study in the near future, our only option is to try to create alternative life-forms ourselves - Artificial Life - literally "life made by Man rather than by Nature."
Artificial Life ("AL" or "Alife") is the name given to a new discipline that studies "natural" life by attempting to recreate biological phenomena from scratch within computers and other "artificial" media. Alife complements the traditional analytic approach of traditional biology with a synthetic approach in which, rather than studying biological phenomena by taking apart living organisms to see how they work, one attempts to put together systems that behave like living organisms.
The process of synthesis has been an extremely important tool in many disciplines. Synthetic chemistry - the ability to put together new chemical compounds not found in nature - has not only contributed enormously to our theoretical understanding of chemical phenomena, but has also allowed us to fabricate new materials and chemicals that are of great practical use for industry and technology.
Artificial life amounts to the practice of "synthetic biology" and, by analogy with synthetic chemistry, the attempt to recreate biological phenomena in alternative media will result in not only better theoretical understanding of the phenomena under study, but also in practical applications of biological principles in the technology of computer hardware and software, mobile robots, spacecraft, medicine, nanotechnology, industrial fabrication and assembly, and other vital engineering projects.
By extending the horizons of empirical research in biology beyond the territory currently circumscribed by life-as-we-know-it, the study of Artificial Life gives us access to the domain of life-as-it- could-be, and it is within this vastly larger domain that we must ground general theories of biology and in which we will discover practical and useful applications of biology in our engineering endeavors.
The best popularization of alife research is
| Author: | Levy, Steven. |
| Title: | Artificial life : the quest for a new creation |
| Published: | New York : Pantheon Books, c1992. |
| Edition: | 1st ed. |
| Subject(s): | Neural networks (Computer science) |
| Material: | viii, 390 p., [8] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 25 cm. |
| Notes: | Includes bibliographical references (p. 349-370) and index. |
| LCCN: | 91050749 |
| ISBN: | 067940774X : |
| System ID No: | ACQ-9647 |
| Location | Call Number | Volume | Material |
|---|---|---|---|
| DH Hill Library | QA76.87 .L49 1992 | c.1 | Book |
The author describes it as
"The first ... history of a new science--a-life, the creation of the behaviors of biology inside the computer and in the actions of robots. The technology of artificial life was first conceived by John von Neumann, who also had plenty to do with the nuclear effort, the technology of artificial death--and now a lot of a-life work is being done at Los Alamos. The book introduces the a-life scientists--a fascinating bunch--explains what they're up to, and explores some of the moral issues behind the work."
For help in thinking about emergent properties of complex systems, see
| Author: | Resnick, Mitchel. |
| Title: | Turtles, termites, and traffic jams : explorations in massively parallel microworlds / Mitchel Resnick. |
| Electronic Access: | View/Checkout this electronic book via netLibrary's web site. (NC State Only) |
| Published: | Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1994. |
| Subject(s): | Parallel processing (Electronic computers) Artificial intelligence. Starlogo (Computer program language) |
| Series: | Complex adaptive systems. |
| Material: | xviii, 163 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. |
| Notes: | "A Bradford book." Includes bibliographical references (p. [157]-163). Foreword / Seymour Papert -- 1. Foundations. The Era of Decentralization -- 2. Constructions. Constructionism. LEGO/Logo. StarLogo. Objects and Parallelism -- 3. Explorations. Simulations and Stimulations. Slime Mold. Artificial Ants. Traffic Jams. Termites. Turtles and Frogs. Turtle Ecology. New Turtle Geometry. Forest Fire. Recursive Trees -- 4. Reflections. The Centralized Mindset. Beyond the Centralized Mindset -- 5. Projections. Growing Up. Appendix B: StarLogo Overview. |
| Notes: | Also available as an electronic book to subscribers of netLibrary Incorporated via the WWW. |
| LCCN: | 94010956 |
| ISBN: | 0262181622 |
| System ID No: | AFZ-6120 |
| Internet Resource -- CALL NUMBER: Electronic book http://www.netlibrary.com/summary.asp?ID=1998 |
| Location | Call Number | Volume | Material |
|---|---|---|---|
| DH Hill Library | QA76.58 .R47 1994 | c.1 | Book |
Resnick's current version of Starlogo is free and can be used to build new (virtual?) artificial life forms.
A report on current work:
Rodney Brooks, "Artificial life: From robot dreams to reality," Nature 8/31/00
Some papers on the philosophical significance of AL:
Mark A. Bedau, The Nature of Life
Mark A. Bedau, Philosophical Content and Method of Artificial Life
Mark A. Bedau. Four Puzzles about Life
Brian L. Keeley, Artificial Life for Philosophers
For (much) more on alife, go to http://alife.org/
