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

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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

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.

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.

This book is a quick read and a great introduction to artificial life. It combines something of the science, the personalities and the history of this field. For general readers with some technical sophistication it affords an opportunity to broaden one's horizons without too much of a mathematical stretch; for computer scientists who are thinking of their own research it can give a general idea of some of the accomplishments in the field and a place to start delving into the original research papers. Read it and enjoy the future!

AL is popular science writing of the first order: informative, clear, fascinating, and entertaining. My only disappointment is that it was published in 1992, and thus does not touch on developments in the field since then. I'd love to know how these have panned out, and whether scientists remain enthusiastic about the possibilities of A-Life. Judging from the textbooks on A-life that have been published since 1992, the field is alive, at least, and I can only assume it is well to boot. I'll have to hunt for bibliography elsewhere. My thanks to Levy for sending me on this hunt. AL is a book to fire the imagination. I'd give it 10 stars!

A note on the metaphysical material in AL that bears on the question of whether present iterations of 'artificial life' are, or whether future iterations may one day be, sufficiently complex that they should be considered true LIFE: throughout, Levy stresses the essential link between an (')organism(') (wet or dry) and its environment. Yet, it seems to me, in discussing the question of the LIFE-status of in-silico 'organisms', he considers the 'organisms' alone. I wonder whether this apparent preference reflects his own bias, or a bias on the part of the scientists he profiles? From the perspective of emergent behavior and the capacity to evolve, etc., AL 'creatures' self-evidently bear a striking resemblance to biological creatures. It strikes me, however, that a key consideration in the wet-life as LIFE versus dry-'life' as LIFE argument -- is that wet-life organisms express emergent behavior and evolve, etc., in environments that are, throughout, rife with other life, whereas dry-'life' 'organisms' do the same in environments that are otherwise sterile (by the standards that A-Life scientists themselves would apply). Some consideration of how environments contribute to the LIFE-status of particular (')organism(')s, and of any definition of LIFE (wet or dry) itself, seems to be of the essence. Yet another thought to pursue -- though doubtless ethologists, philosophers, and A-Life scientists have beaten me there. Proof positive that AL is a highly thought-provoking book. Read it!

A report from the frontier where computers meet biology. This is a great book. How else would it make it onto Kwato's select reading list?

About the genetic algorithm. Remember all the fuss about expert systems and artificial intelligence? Well, this is the way ol' Mother Nature figures out how to get things done. Chilling. Terrifying, Interesting. Colonies of light in magnetic and silicate media live, die, reproduce and struggle for survival.

This is the best book of its type I have ever read. It is really, really interesting and Steve Levy puts it all together. Sala'am, Steve Levy (I am making oriental-style bows in my cube right now) Plus is is scary. Not fun scary like Frankenstein, but deep-down scary. The future belongs to RAM creatures.

This is an extremely well written survey of the entire field of Alife. It's the best general introduction to Alife in print and I expect it shall be in print for quite some time.

This book is a terrific introduction and overview to the field of artificial life. Not to be at all confused with the more mundane "artificial intellgence", AL is the quest to create something that can be considered to be sentient within a computer system. Great reading for everyone, not just the technically literate, on a subject that I believe will become one of the great issues and debates of the 21st century.

Levy presents a fascinating roundup of the state of the art in this new field of computer science, complete with interviews with some colorful personalities and their pet projects. A must for cyberculture groupies and followers of cutting-edge thought.

--Richard Brodie, author, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Mem

If you like science at all, are even remotely interested in articial life and artificial intelligence, this book is a real page turner. I first read it back in the 90's, I have spent the last 6 years studying AI neural nets and this book is still relevant, fascinating, and very well written.