Ken's ALife Page


Introduction...

Artificial Life is devoted to a new discipline that investigates the scientific, engineering, philosophical, and social issues involved in our rapidly increasing technological ability to synthesize life-like behaviors from scratch in computers, machines, molecules, and other alternative media. 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 found general theories of biology and in which we will discover practical and useful applications of biology in our engineering endeavors.

Artificial Life is the first unifying forum for the dissemination of scientific research in the field of artificial life. Relevant topics span the hierarchy of biological organization, including studies of the origin of life, self-assembly, growth and development, evolutionary and ecological dynamics, animal and robot behavior, social organization, and cultural evolution.


A Brief 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 neeed 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.

Genetic Algorithms, Cellular Automata, The Genetic Programming, Memetics, Artificial Life, Adaptive Behavior, and Evolutionary Computation are all topics covered in this cross referencing node.

The A.L. & S.O.S. Short List...

ALife On-Line The Santa Fe Institute
List of on-line Alife papers Includes genetic programming, learning, autonomous agents, robotics, and evolution.
Artificial Life Bibliography A Semi-annotated Artificial Life Bibliography of On-line Publications By Ezequiel A Di Paolo
Artificial Life Resources FAQ
Fuzzy Logic
Self-Organizing Systems


Links on Complexity, Self-organization and Artificial Life

Complexity, Self-Organization

Alife, Evolutionary Systems and Simulations