What is Artificial Life, or A-Life?The study of life and living systems has historically been dominated by the study of organic (carbon-based) organisms as they are found on one isolated planet in a vast universe of possibilities. This study is largely contained within the field of biology, which applies a top-down approach-essentially taking apart existing living systems to discover the essential elements. Because the number and variety of living systems available for study is strictly limited, biology has some inherent weaknesses. The biological approach can be compared to an attempt to learn the principles of painting by studying the works found in a single museum or created by a single artist. While such an approach will surely yield many valuable insights, it is unlikely that we can learn all that there is to know about the subject of painting in this manner. In the same way that a deeper understanding of painting can be gained by attempting to create your own works, those within the discipline of A-Life seek to better understand life and living systems through the simulation and synthesis of natural living systems. "[R]ather 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." (zooland.alife.org) Examples:
The field of Artificial Life is, by nature, interdisciplinary, encompassing as it does the disparate fields of computer science, biology, physics, mathematics and many others. Some definitions of A-Life: Artificial life... is the study of life through the use of human-made analogs of living systems. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Life) Artificial life is the interdisciplinary enterprise investigating the fundamental properties of living systems through the simulation and synthesis of life-like processes in artificial media. (http://www.alifex.org/) Artificial Life... is a new discipline that studies "natural" life by attempting to recreate biological phenomena from scratch within computers and other "artificial" media. -From Chris Adami, professor at California Institute of Technology, and Titus Brown, respected author and graduate of California Institute of Technology. The term "Artificial Life" is used to describe research into human-made systems that possess some of the essential properties of life... This effort is truly interdisciplinary and runs the gamut from biology, chemistry and physics to computer science and engineering. While a large part of Artificial Life is devoted to understanding life as we know it-that is, life on earth-a significant effort concerns the search for principles of living systems which are independent of a particular substrate. Thus, Artificial Life also considers life "as it could be," exploring artificial alternatives to a carbon-based chemistry... Artificial Life is often described as attempting to understand high-level behavior from low-level rules; for example, how the simple rules of Darwinian evolution lead to high-level structure, or the way in which the simple interactions between ants and their environment lead to complex trail-following behavior. -From Chris Adami, professor at California Institute of Technology, and Titus Brown, respected author and graduate of California Institute of Technology. Artificial Life is a field of scientific study that attempts to model living biological systems through complex algorithms. Scientists use these models to test and experiment with a multitude of factors on the behavior of the systems. Emergence of A-Life as a DisciplineThe term "artificial life" was coined in the late 1980s by researcher Christopher Langton, who defined it as "the study of artificial systems that exhibit behavior characteristic of natural living systems. It is the quest to explain life in any of its possible manifestations, without restriction to the particular examples that have evolved on earth... the ultimate goal is to extract the logical form of living systems." Probably the first person to actively study and write on topics related to A-Life was the noted mathematician John Von Neumann, who was also an early figure in the field of game theory. In the middle of the 20th century, Von Neumann delivered a paper entitled "The General and Logical Theory of Automata," in which he discussed the concept of a machine that follows simple rules and reacts to information in its environment. Von Neumann proposed that living organisms are just such machines. He also studied the concept of machine self-replication, and conceived the idea that a self-replicating machine, or organism, must contain within itself a list of instructions for producing a copy of itself. This was several years before James Watson and Francis Crick, with the help of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, discovered the structure of DNA. The first real exposure of A-Life concepts to the general public came through the "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American magazine. In the 1960s a professor named John Conway devised a simple cellular automaton (CA) that he called the Game of Life. Conway's CA was simple enough for just about anyone to understand and "play" with, but it exhibited amazingly complex and life-like behavior. Up to this point, there was no discipline for these concepts that we now recognize as related to A-Life. It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that an unconventional programmer, named Christopher Langton coined the term "Artificial Life." Langton is also responsible for the first conference specifically dedicated to this new discipline, the "International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems," also known as "Artificial Life 1." The 10th such conference will take place in Bloomington, Indiana, June 3rd-7th, 2006. From these conferences, the ideas of A-Life spread into academia. |
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