Artificial life refers to human attempts to create systems with biological properties, commonly associated with computer simulation. John von Neumann first studied and popularized artificial life in the 1940s. The field is still in development and has recently been included in leading scientific publications. The cost of computing power will likely lead to the growth of the field.
Artificial life is a generic term used to refer to human attempts to create systems with realistic properties that all biological organisms possess, such as self-reproduction, homeostasis, adaptability, mutational variation, optimization of external states, and etc. The term is commonly associated with computer simulation-based artificial life, heavily preferred over robotics due to its ease of reprogramming, inexpensive hardware, and greater design space to explore. The term “artificial life,” often abbreviated 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 Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987.
Artificial life projects can be thought of as attempts to generalize the phenomenon of life, asking questions such as “what would life have been like if it had evolved under radically different physical conditions?”, “what is the logical form of all living systems? ” , or “what is the simplest possible living system?”
Like many other fascinating topics related to computer science, artificial life was first studied and popularized by John von Neumann. In the late 1940s, he presented a lecture “The General and Logical Theory of Automata,” which introduced theoretical objects called automata, state machines that have undergone transformations based on well-defined rules that integrate internal and external information. Von Neumann developed such automata in great detail using nothing more than graph paper and a pencil: his first automata were represented as cells undergoing changes of state on an infinite 2-D grid. During his last days, von Neumann worked on cellular automata and his theories of self-replicating machines, developing the first formal cellular automata with Stanislaw Ulam in the 1950s.
The decades that followed saw cellular automata and artificial life come and go in and out of fashion. Highlights include Cambridge professor John Conway’s Game of Life, a simple cellular automaton that can be easily explained and operated on any computer, and the opening of the Santa Fe Institute, an academic institution with a substantial focus on artificial life .
In 2002, building on more than a decade of intense work, British mathematician and particle physicist Stephen Wolfram published the weighty and controversial tome “A New Kind of Science,” a book filled with pictures of cellular automata and explanations of how they can supposedly explain some of the most basic underlying patterns in the world. He has described his book as decades ahead of his time, but he has as many, if not more, critics than supporters.
Artificial life is still a very new discipline, having only been established in the late 1980s, and is still very much in development. Like other new fields, it has come under some criticism. Based on its abstract nature, artificial life has taken some time to be understood and accepted by the mainstream; articles on the subject have only recently been included in leading scientific publications such as Nature and Science. As with any new discipline, researchers need time to select the most fruitful research avenues and translate their findings into terms that other scientists and ordinary people can understand and appreciate. The artificial life field looks set to grow as the cost of computing power continues to decline.
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