Artificial Life Models in Software

by Andrew Adamatzky (Editor), Maciej Komosinski (Editor)

Arti?cial life is an interdisciplinary ?eld of science, hosting experts from c- puter science, biology, physics, chemistry, and mathematics, as well as phi- sophers and artists. It focuses on studying the phenomena of life on all levels of complexity and organization — molecular, cellular, organismic, and p- ulation. These studies not only employ conventional computers (using both software and hardware), but also take place in wetware, using techniques of biochemical laboratory. Arti?cial life research is not limited to life forms - isting on the Earth. It rather attempts to study the general principles of life which are common to all instances of life, both already recognized and yet unknown. This book is dedicated to the software medium, the most popular and widely employed in the arti?cial life research. The software medium o?ers almost unlimited abilities for experiments, which are cheap, easily arranged, and modi?ed. Additionally, such experiments canbe repeated under the same conditions, and large amounts of data (unavailable in biological studies) can be collectedfor analysis.To beginexperimentation,a modelof lifeis required. Such models are built in software for all organizational levels of life. Most of the models described in this book are very general and therefore allow for a wide range of experiments.

Genres: Science

Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Jlawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think my little artificial-life fascination is waning (it's all Maxis' SimLife program's fault I'm into this stuff), but this is a good book. It surveys 12 recent artificial life programs that are free and available for download (or at least were circa 2003 - a couple now seem to be unavailable).

Especially interesting was Avida, which simulates programs within a virtual machine that compete for space and resources, and attempt to replicate and evolve. It looks like some fascinating results have come from Avida runs, but they unfortunately require you to understand the assembly-like language the program-organisms write to really appreciate. Also intriguing is Framsticks, which allows you to construct 3-d organisms that likewise interact with a virtual environment and evolve.

Each article is written by a developer of the program under discussion, which allows the programs' processes to be discussed in great detail. This is great, but also means that possible flaws or limitations of each program's approach are not addressed, as they perhaps would be if reviews of the programs by people outside the development process were included. That's about the only flaw of the book (well, and that the last article, about the possible uses of artificial life in art, could've been fascinating but was short and slap-dash).