Artificial life
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 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). Of interest has also been the application of co-evolution
to Lindenmayer systems.
Artificial life as a field has had a controversial history, some have characterized
it as "practical theology" or a "fact-free science". However, for many, artificial
life is a meeting point for people from many other more traditional fields such
as linguistics,
physics, mathematics,
philosophy, computer
science and biology
in which unusual computational and theoretical approaches that would be controversial
within their home discipline can be discussed.
Related fields and
subfields
Open problems
-
"What is life?"
- "When can we say that a system, or a subsytem, is alive?"
