Artificial Life

Artificial life is a little like artificial intelligence, except dumber. The difference is that alife isn't trying to recreate the human mind artificially, but will settle happily with a decent model of how simple life forms behave in their environments. Artificial life to me is a broad term which encompasses (but is not limited to) the specific fields of Cellular Automata, Intelligent Agents, Complex Adaptive Systems, Genetic Algorithms, Simulated Evolution, and even Neural Nets. At some point, however the line between Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life begins to blur, just as the definition of which organic creatures are intelligent is not clear.

To me, one of the best examples of what artificial life is really all about is still the Tierra program created by Tom Ray. Written in C, it runs on a variety of platforms, and executables are available for at least Windows 95/NT, DOS, Linux and Amiga. Check here for both source and executables. When I first compiled and ran Tierra back in 1994, I was blown away by the implications of the evolution that took place. Especially when I read that his "creatures" evolved compression mechanisms to make themselves more efficient.

Avida appears to be a derivative of Tierra. While I haven't looked at it much, it looks equally cool.

Technosphere, which has gone through three iterations now, has been a pretty cool project since the original. It allows users to design "creatures" and release them into a digital environment with other such "creatures". Getting to their web page can be troublesome as connectivity (at least from the US) seems to be spotty.

A good general place for links is Erik Max Francis' ALife Links Page.

The Santa Fe Institute used to maintain Artificial Life Online which contained lots of good info and links, but they've let it slide lately. Maybe version 2 will appear soon.

Shane Williams

Last modified: Thu Mar 30 18:01:20 CST 2000