Artificial-Life

Artificial Life (AL) is an attempt to understand life as it is by examining a larger context of life as it could be. The underlying supposition is that life owes at least as much to its existence to the way in which information is organized as it does to the physical substance (i.e., matter) that embodies that information. 

The fundamental concept of AL is emergence, or the appearance of higher-level properties and behaviors of a system that - while obviously originating from the collective dynamics of that system s components - are neither to be found in nor are directly deducible from the lower-level properties of that system. Emergent properties are properties of the whole that are not possessed by any of the individual parts making up that whole an air molecule is not a tornado and a neuron is not conscious. 

They are defined by populations of simple programs or instructions about how individual parts all interact. 

There is no single master oracle program that directs the action of all other programs. 

Each program defines how simple entities respond to their environment locally. 

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Langton First artificial life conference held at the Santa Fe Institute... 

Varela,et al First European conference on artificial life... 

Other important historical landmarks include the founding, in 1984, of the Santa Fe Institute, which is one of the leading interdisciplinary centers for complex systems theory research the first conference devoted solely to research in cellular automata (which is a prototypical mathematical model of complex systems), organized by Farmer, Toffoli and Wolfram at MIT in 1984 [farmer84] and the first artificial life conference, organized by Chri.s Langton at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in 1987 [lang89]. 

The dynamic,s underlying EINSTein is patterned after mobile CA rules, and are somewhat reminiscent of Braitenberg s Vehicles [brait84]. Specifically, EINSTein takes a artificial-life-like bottom-up, synthesist approach to the modeling of combat, rather than the more traditional top-down, or reductionist approach,... 

The next great strides in science will be founded on the sciences of complexity and artificial life. 

The developmental histories of artificial life and cellular automata have been intertwined ever since von Neumann hrst showed how to construct a self-reproducing automaton ([voiiN66] see section 11.7). A brief historical overview of artificial life appears in chapter 11. 

Just as artificial life seeks to aii.swer the question of whether life is really an emergent property of the organization of matter and is not just some unique embodiment of its substance, so too it might be said that the goal of finite physics is to see whether physics - what we call reality - is fundamentally a property of the organization of information rather than a unique embodiment of the interaction... 

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