Artificial Life

Artificial Life, SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Ed. C. Langton, Addison-Wesely Publishing Company, 1988.

People

Studying synthetic systems that exhibit the behaviors in natural living systems.
1. Maybe add unnatural living systems.
2. life-as-it-could-be, emphasis the author.
Life-like behavior is independent from the underlying material.
With no available extra-terrestrial biology to compare Earth based carbon biology to, Artificial Life is the only comparison available.
Biology is top down.
AL is bottom up.
AL studies emergent behavior. Simple pieces work to together to create complex behaviors with no central control.
1. Biology and Reality are both distributed systems.
Artificiality - Human made to imitate biological behavior with high fidelity.
Traditional programing, procedural and deterministic state, is inadequate. A dynamic model is needed.
1. Open world vs. closed world.
2. Ongoing dynamic behavior and not a final result.
3. Turing Machine won't do for this.
The essential features for computer-based AL are:
1. They consist of populations of simple programs or specifications
2. There is no single program that directs all of the other programs
3. Each program describes the way in which a simple entity reacts to local situations in its environment, including interactions with other entities.
4. There are no rules in the system that dictate global behavior.
5. Any behavior at levels higher than the individual programs is therefore emergent.