Customer Reviews

Virtual Organisms : The Startling World of Artificial Life

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If you want a non-technical, easy to read introduction to artificial life, then this book is for you. But, if you know anything about programming, then you will be disapointed. It has not a single line of code in the entire book, and is short on detail on exactly how things work. Stephen Levy did it better years ago with 'Artificial Life'. The only thing better about 'Virtual Organisms' is that it covers a few things that have happened since Levy. If Levy were to write a new edition including the new material, then this book would be totally superfluous for serious readers.

I have to disagree with many of the other reviewers that have commented on this text as I feel that it provides an excellent introduction to the field of Artificial Life. Any reader who picks up a 'penguin' style softback book with a jazzy cover running to no more than a couple of hundred pages and expects entensive algorthmic listings has little or no experience of printed IT literature. Bearing in mind the limitations imposed upon the author by the parameters of this work, this text provides an excellent theoretical perpective of the field free from the restrictive and time consuming portrayal of endless lines of coding that some reviewers would prefer to see. This is not a technical manual and does not purport to be, it is an excellent introductory text designed for those who use computers and are not used by them.

This book is an interesting survey of progress in using intelligent computer programs like cellular automata to replace older, more rigid programs. Ward attempts to redefine life as the passing of information. He concludes that "the informational basis of life can be abstracted away from the bodies we find it in and lose nothing in the process."

He wants to attribute "life" to both organic and inorganic species, thus his title. He moves by steps to show that the quality of human life is no more special than the life of plants, birds, mammals, insects, algae and fish. Although man has advantages with manipulating symbols, other life forms are superior as receptors of smells (ants and dogs) and gravitational maps (salmon and migrating birds). Ward wants the reader to accept the idea that there is nothing any more special about human life than there is about ant life. In fact many of the Artificial Life programs were inspired by ant behavior. All life becomes a matter of processing information.

Most of the examples given were in the field of telecommunications, network switching. Parallels were drawn between the information passed in DNA replication and that passed by computer programs. The groups he discusses are endeavoring to breed software in an evolutionary manner analogous to breeding animal life. To his thinking a string of computer bits are agents analogous to a string of amino acids in the chromosome of living agents-interesting ideas.

The book description states, "...Mark Ward presents a fascinating survey..." but the book does not even come close to remotely interesting. The cover art, title, and book description are the highlights of this book, anything beyond that is an extremely dry read.

I am surprised that such an interesting subject could be transformed into such a boring lecture. The first 60 pages is dedicated to a tedious review of basic evolution which has become common knowledge. Only later, after losing the readers' interest, does Ward begin to tie this in with the actual subject of the book, artificial life. Yet even when he gets to artificial life, programming codes are not included in the book, so don't even think about it. It's as if Ward were a humanities major writing an extremely tiresome thesis on artificial life.

The only saving grace is the actual subject--even Ward cannot completely dampen the fascinating experiments with his stilted prose. Someone interested in doing a book report on the history of organismal life to artificial life may want to give Ward a try--anyone else familiar with the subject of A life should avoid this book.

Another book from an English writer that covers the subject of information in living organisms. This follows on the subject covered in "The Bit and the Pendulum" about the DNA and RNA using digital code in the process of reproduction. Nerds are not invited to read the book. English writers seem to stay away from the Hype and let us in on Memes and Genes and present research on psychology in a methodical manner that references wide ranging thinking and writing such as this one does.