Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology [Paperback]

Steven Levy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 27, 1993

This enthralling book alerts us to nothing less than the existence of new varieties of life. Some of these species can move and eat, see, reproduce, and die. Some behave like birds or ants. One such life form may turn out to be our best weapon in the war against AIDS.

What these species have in common is that they exist inside computers, their DNA is digital, and they have come into being not through God's agency but through the efforts of a generation of scientists who seek to create life in silico.

But even as it introduces us to these brilliant heretics and unravels the intricacies of their work. Artificial Life examines its subject's dizzying philosophical implications: Is a self-replicating computer program any less alive than a flu virus? Are carbon-and-water-based entities merely part of the continuum of living things? And is it possible that one day "a-life" will look back at human beings and dismiss us as an evolutionary way station -- or, worse still, a dead end?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Writing primarily for readers with backgrounds in science, Levy focuses on the conceptual edge that artificial-life research defines. Photos.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The effort to create artificial life is occurring primarily within computer science, although it brings together physicists, microbiologists, mathematicians, ethologists, and others in addition to computer scientists. The computer's ability to simulate system development is being generalized to study evolution and reproduction. Neural networks, while also used for applications other than artificial life simulation, are the primary form considered. As in his earlier book on computer hackers ( Hackers , LJ 11/1/84), Levy paints vivid images of the people involved in this work and puts a lot of effort into explanation of technical details, but this book is not easy reading. (None of the notes or figures were seen.) For larger specialized science collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/92.
- Hilary D. Burton, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Livermore, Cal.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (July 27, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679743898
• ISBN-13: 978-0679743897
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,109,031 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #35 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Artificial Life

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Customer Reviews

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent intro to a new science, February 18, 2001

By 

Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Artificial Life: The Quest for a New Creation (Hardcover)

While the concept of artificial life has been around at least since humans developed self-awareness, the commensurate decline of religion and rise of the scientific method was necessary for it to become a point of real debate. However, it was not until September 1987 when the event occurred that established a-life as an academic discipline, namely a conference devoted to its study. This work uses that event as a starting point, and does a superb job of presenting nearly all perspectives, including historical.
Like its counterpart, artificial intelligence, the discipline of a-life suffers from a lack of definition. There is no agreement on what life or intelligence are. Additional disagreement arises over the following distinctive descriptions of life.

(a) Objects such as rocks can be assigned a life (intelligence) value of zero and as we move upward to humans and beyond, the measure of life (intelligence) characteristics is described by a smooth, continuous function where the first derivative never becomes very large, but is always positive. There is no clearly discernible boundary between life and non-life.

(b) Starting from the same initial position as (a), the derivative stays close to zero for some time, and then suddenly becomes unbounded, as the matter now possesses the fundamental essence of life (intelligence). That point of the vertical derivative is the boundary point between animate and inanimate objects.

Much of this book deals with cellular automata and the algorithms used to create them. Like so many new, perhaps revolutionary disciplines, the major players tend to be free spirits. Many of the people described here bounced around before finding their ecological niche in a-life. With the exception of the originators, John von Neumann and John Horton Conway, those who established the study of cellular automata as an academic discipline were academic outsiders who literally created it from nothing. The explanation of that is very well done. While most of the work has been done by computer, no previous knowledge is necessary to understand the text.
One item could have been better handled, but that is largely due to the problems with definitions. Like the workers in chaos, a-lifers tend to see what they want to see. For example, simple rules are used to create an image that either looks or acts like something known to be alive and this is used to argue that life is being created or that the rules that create life are simple. Which is an extremely weak argument. What is being created are items that human eyes interpret as looking like life, and as all psychologists know, the human brain processes images with a bias towards previous experience. The devil's advocate against is a shadow here. However, it is difficult to argue in the negative when you are aiming at a nebulous target.
Whatever your interest in a-life, you will find something of value in this book. Biologists and philosophers who teach general education courses will also find a good deal of discussion material. The hypothetical qualification has been removed form the debate, as there are now objects to argue about.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Introduction to Many Scientists, February 1, 2000

By 

William M. Rand (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology (Paperback)

This book serves as a good introduction to the work many individuals are doing not only in Artificial Life but also in fields related to Artificial Life. If you want an indepth examination then you will probably have to find items written by the individual scientists, but this is enough to get your feet wet and thus allow you to focus your search. If you are interested in these topics I would suggest you also look at Complexity Science and the similar books there like "Complexity" by Waldrop and "Out of Control" by Kelly, though many times the anecdotes in these three stories are very similiar Waldrop and Kelly look more at Santa Fe Institute. Finally though I haven't read the reprint version of this book, the original book seems very gloomy in terms of its attitude on Artificial Life. Levy seems to think that Artificial Life will be created but the entire last chapter seems to indicate he thinks it will be bad. Anyway it's a good book overall especially if you know nothing about the subject. If you know something then it provides a good examination to a lot of different techniques and you can easily learn something you didn't know before.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fascinating, February 3, 2001

By 

Siavosh Bahrami "sb" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology (Paperback)

I read this more than three years ago, before I started my undergraduate studies. I knew I was going to study computer science, but after reading this book I knew I would forever be drawn to the multidisciplinary fields of biology and computer science. From the question of the origin of life to intelligence, the book convinced me that a new approach is needed to solve these old mysteries.

It's not a masterpiece of literature, but it was interesting enough to forever change my research career.