Artificial Life!
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| Artificial Life! |
- What is Artificial Life?
Anwer.The study of life and living systems has historically been dominated by the study of organic (carbon-based) organisms as they are found on one isolated planet in a vast universe of possibilities. This study is largely contained within the field of biology, which applies a top-down approach-essentially taking apart existing living systems to discover the essential elements. Because the number and variety of living systems available for study is strictly limited, biology has some inherent weaknesses.
The biological approach can be compared to an attempt to learn the principles of painting by studying the works found in a single museum or created by a single artist. While such an approach will surely yield many valuable insights, it is unlikely that we can learn all that there is to know about the subject of painting in this manner. In the same way that a deeper understanding of painting can be gained by attempting to create your own works, those within the discipline of A-Life seek to better understand life and living systems through the simulation and synthesis of natural living systems. "[R]ather than studying biological phenomena by taking apart living organisms to see how they work, one attempts to put together systems that behave like living organisms
Emergence of A-Life as a Discipline
The term "artificial life" was coined in the late 1980s by researcher Christopher Langton, who defined it as "the study of artificial systems that exhibit behavior characteristic of natural living systems. It is the quest to explain life in any of its possible manifestations, without restriction to the particular examples that have evolved on earth... the ultimate goal is to extract the logical form of living systems."
Probably the first person to actively study and write on topics related to A-Life was the noted mathematician John Von Neumann, who was also an early figure in the field of game theory. In the middle of the 20th century, Von Neumann delivered a paper entitled "The General and Logical Theory of Automata," in which he discussed the concept of a machine that follows simple rules and reacts to information in its environment. Von Neumann proposed that living organisms are just such machines. He also studied the concept of machine self-replication, and conceived the idea that a self-replicating machine, or organism, must contain within itself a list of instructions for producing a copy of itself. This was several years before James Watson and Francis Crick, with the help of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, discovered the structure of DNA.
The first real exposure of A-Life concepts to the general public came through the "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American magazine. In the 1960s a professor named John Conway devised a simple cellular automaton (CA) that he called the Game of Life. Conway's CA was simple enough for just about anyone to understand and "play" with, but it exhibited amazingly complex and life-like behavior.
Artificial Life vs. Artificial Intelligence
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n order to begin an exploration into the world of Artificial Life Programming, it helps to start with a vision of what it is. Of equal importance to the nature and purpose of A-Life is how it differs from Artificial Intelligence.
According to the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID):
Artificial Life does overlap with Artificial Intelligence but the two areas are very different in their approach and history. Artificial Life is concerned with specific life-oriented algorithms such as genetic algorithms which can mimic nature and its laws and therefore relates more to biology, whereas Artificial Intelligence tends to look at how human intelligence can be replicated, therefore relating more to psychology
- How does life arise from the nonliving?
- Generate a molecular proto-organism in vitro.
- Achieve the transition to life in an artificial chemistry in silico.
- Determine whether fundamentally novel living organizations can exist.
- Simulate a unicellular organism over its entire life cycle.
- Explain how rules and symbols are generated from physical dynamics in living systems.
- What are the potentials and limits of living systems?
- Determine what is inevitable in the open-ended evolution of life.
- Determine minimal conditions for evolutionary transitions from specific to generic response systems.
- Create a formal framework for synthesizing dynamical hierarchies at all scales.
- Determine the predictability of evolutionary consequences of manipulating organisms and ecosystems.
- Develop a theory of information processing, information flow, and information generation for evolving systems.
- How is life related to mind, machines, and culture?
- Demonstrate the emergence of intelligence and mind in an artificial living system.
- Evaluate the influence of machines on the next major evolutionary transition of life.
- Provide a quantitative model of the interplay between cultural and biological evolution.
- Establish ethical principles for artificial life.
