Customer Reviews

The Garden in the Machine

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Emmeche's slim book is a great intro for those interested in this new & theoretical science. It is well-written, with a constant eye towards the philosophical side of the emerging discipline of "artificial life". Crucial to this discipline is the idea that "form"--a self-organized pattern in space--takes precedence over the material substrate of which it is made. As Emmeche emphasizes throughout his narrative, computer scientists have gained better results at modeling artificial life with the "bottom-up" approach (in contrast to "top-down" attempts to legislate global behavior of these systems). This is a good book for those who might want to study the amazing work of Chris Langton and Stuart Kaufmann. Those chapters in particular are excellent.

Perhaps it's the translation, but the author comes off as overly dubious about the field he claims to want to introduce to us. The book might be useful to philosophers who want to pick fights with a-life enthusiasts, but it's very unsatisfying if you want to learn anything. Some philosophy of science books are much more than cursory glances at the science (Cartwright's How the Laws of Physics Lie or Mayo's Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge come to mind), but this isn't one of them. There are so many facinating paths that you can explore starting from the idea of a-life that Emmeches' attempts to fence-in the field come across as premature and pointless.

"If life is information, and information is an answer...What was the question?"

In this insightful piece of work danish theoretical biologist Claus Emmeche introduces Artificial Life as a true interdisciplinary scientific subject and discusses the topic from both a scientific and philosophical point of view.

Using a language that's easy to understand but also complete the book deals with artificial (computer-simulated) life and its relationship with areas such as auto-organization, emergence, cellular automata, chaos theory, fractals and artificial intelligence.

Although not very extense the book features 7 chapters with 170 excellent references to the "creme" of the subject which are alone worth its price. Computer geeks (such as me) will undoubtly suffer the lack of any source code or companion software.

Great little introduction to the world of artificial life. Short, but to the point, and without the exaggerated claims of many of its proponents trying to use these models to justify Darwinian theories, the book gives a glimpse of the main elements of the field. We must be seeing the evolutionary theories of the future, the first real ones, being born here.