Artificial life Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

Artificial life, also known as alife, is the study of life through the use of human-made analogs of living systems. Computer scientist Christopher Langton coined the term in the late 1980s when he held the first "International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" (otherwise known as Artificial Life I) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987.

Artificial life researchers have often been divided into two main groups (although other groupings are possible):

• The strong alife position states that "life is a process which can be abstracted away from any particular medium". (John Von Neumann). Notably the position of Tom Ray who declared that his program Tierra was not simulating life in a computer, but was synthesizing it.
• The weak alife position denies the possibility of generating a "living process" outside of a carbon-based chemical solution. Its researchers try instead to mimic life processes to understand the appearance of single phenomena. The usual way is through an agent based model, which usually gives a minimal possible solution. That is: "we don't know what in nature generates this phenomenon, but it could be something as simple as..."

The field is characterized by the extensive use of computer programs and computer simulations which include evolutionary algorithms (EA), genetic algorithms (GA), genetic programming (GP), artificial chemistries (AC), agent-based models, and cellular automata (CA).

Artificial life is a meeting point for people from many other more traditional fields such as linguistics, physics, mathematics, philosophy, computer science, biology, anthropology and sociology in which unusual computational and theoretical approaches that would be controversial within their home discipline can be discussed. As a field, it has had a controversial history; John Maynard Smith criticized certain artificial life work in 1995 as "fact-free science", and it has not received much attention from most biologists. However, the recent publication of artificial life articles in the journal Nature is evidence that artificial life techniques are becoming more accepted in the mainstream, at least as a method of studying evolution.

Table of contents

1 See also 2 Open problems 3 External links

See also

• artificial chemistry
• boids
• digital organisms
• evolutionary art
• clanking replicator
• carbon chauvinism
• robotics
• systems biology
• wet alife
• neural nets
• Lindenmayer systems

Open problems

• "What is life?"
• "When can we say that a system, or a subsytem, is alive?"
• "What is the smallest system that we can consider alive?"
• "Why is nature able to achieve an open-ended evolutionary system, while all human models seem to fall short of it?"
• "How can we measure evolution?"
• "How can we measure emergence?"

External links

• International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL)
• Artificial Life (journal)

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