What is Artificial Life?
What do we really mean when we use this term? One could answer like Langton: that it is about systems, built by man, which present characteristic behaviors of natural living. But then, what are these characteristics? How much of it is necessary to speak about artificial life? This definition is, as be seen, much too vague. It has however the merit to give us a base of reflection. When Langton speaks about characteristics of natural livings, it is doubtless that he defines life as a group of properties. Now, it is impossible to make a list, in a strict way, of all the properties of living. To remedy this, Maturana and Varla proposed as from 1979 another much more relevant definition, nevertheless still too much underestimated by scientists. It is a question of conceiving a being as an autopoeitic organization. It characterizes the fact that a being is a network of dynamic transformations manufacturing its own components (metabolism), and that builds a topological barrier (membrane), whi
Christopher G Langton Editor of the Artificial Life journal co-founder, Swarm Corp 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 unli
Artificial life is a blanket term used to refer to human attempts at setting up systems with lifelike properties all biological organisms possess, such as self-reproduction, homeostasis, adaptability, mutational variation, optimization of external states, and so on. The term is commonly associated with computer simulation-based artificial life, preferred heavily to robotics because of its ease of reprogramming, inexpensive hardware, and greater design space to explore. The term “artificial life”, often shortened to “alife” or “a-life”, was originally coined by computer scientist Christopher Langton at the International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987. Artificial life projects can be thought of as attempts to generalize the phenomenon of life, asking questions like, “what would life have looked like if it evolved under radically different physical conditions?”, “what is the logical form of all living systems?”, o
