{"id":3020,"date":"2021-09-14T19:31:09","date_gmt":"2021-09-14T19:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alife.org\/?post_type=encyclopedia&#038;p=3020"},"modified":"2022-09-28T13:17:20","modified_gmt":"2022-09-28T13:17:20","slug":"artificial-life","status":"publish","type":"encyclopedia","link":"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/introduction\/artificial-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Artificial Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"What_is_it\"><\/span>What is it?<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Artificial Life (ALife, a-life, Alife) is a very broad field that intersects with many other fields, including biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, art, philosophy, astronomy, and more. Because of this, it is difficult to pin down an exact definition, but you can generally think of it as anything that examines the properties and dynamics of life, regardless of substrate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For a high-level video overview of what the field, see this (somewhat impromptu) talk by Emily Dolson at the 2021 ISAL Summer School:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<p class=\"responsive-video-wrap clr\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"ISAL Summer School Part1\" width=\"1200\" height=\"675\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/JIyTKefR4og?start=923&amp;feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>For a more philosophical introduction with some great computational demos, see video talk by David Ackley (which is also included in the above video, with some added discussion):<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<p class=\"responsive-video-wrap clr\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"NMCS4ALL: Artificial Life (full version)\" width=\"1200\" height=\"900\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/YJRRu4dJnTI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Categories\"><\/span>Categories<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>There are four main categories of artificial life:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>Wet Artificial Life &ndash; using chemicals and organic building blocks to create life-like systems in the real world and study their dynamics.<\/li><li>Soft Artificial Life &ndash; using software in a computer to create life-like systems and study their dynamics.<\/li><li>Hard Artificial Life &ndash; using hardware to create life-life systems in the real world and study their dynamics. This is usually with robotics of some kind.<\/li><li>Artificial Life in Art &ndash; using artificial life systems to create art and using art to examine the properties of and assumptions about life-like systems.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Wet_Artificial_Life\"><\/span>Wet Artificial Life<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The following subfields and systems generally fall under wet alife:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><a href=\"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/introduction\/synthetic-biology\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Synthetic biology is a subarea of artificial life and genetic engineering that involves the redesign of existing life for new and\/or ameliorated purposes, as well as the artificial creation of entirely new living organisms through controlled mutations of organisms&rsquo; deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). Essentially, in synthetic biology, engineers think about biology as a piece of&hellip;\" class=\"encyclopedia\">Synthetic biology<\/a><\/li><li>Synthetic chemistry<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/synthetic-biology\/droplets\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Liquid droplets are a research platform used in ALife to study the emergence of complex life-like behaviors from fairly simple combinations of chemicals. Droplets are created by putting a drop of one liquid (such as oil) into a different liquid that it cannot mix with (such as water). Additional chemicals are then added to droplet&hellip;\" class=\"encyclopedia\">Droplets<\/a><\/li><li>Xenobots<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Soft_Artificial_Life\"><\/span>Soft Artificial Life<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The following subfields and systems generally fall under soft alife:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><a href=\"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/artificial-chemistry\/artificial-chemistries\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Artificial Chemistry is a subfield of Artificial Life that seeks to explore the &ldquo;emergence, evolution, and behavior of life&rdquo; via simulations of molecular processes . In this field, researchers study systems made up of virtual molecules that interact according to a defined set of rules in the hopes that they will assemble themselves into more&hellip;\" class=\"encyclopedia\">Artificial Chemistries<\/a><\/li><li>Evolutionary computation<\/li><li>Complex adaptive systems<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/artificial-ecology\/artificial-ecologies\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Like evolution, ecology is a central force within living and life-like systems. It stands to reason, then, that artificial ecologies come up in many different areas of ALife. For a video version of this article, see Emily Dolson's talk at the 2021 ISAL summer school below: https:\/\/youtu.be\/DqocgHRdxfw What is ecology? Ecology is the study of&hellip;\" class=\"encyclopedia\">Artificial ecologies<\/a><\/li><li>ALife in social science<\/li><li>ALife for social good<\/li><li>Neural networks<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/introduction\/cellular-automata\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"A cellular automaton (plural: cellular automata) is composed of a grid of cells. Traditionally, cells can be in a finite number of discrete states, although some more modern variations on cellular automata have changed this rule. A set of global rules determine how cells transition from state to state as time advances. Often, these update&hellip;\" class=\"encyclopedia\">Cellular automata<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/digital-evolution\/introduction-to-digital-evolution\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Overview https:\/\/youtu.be\/2kiKt71dN8U Digital evolution systems are a class of Artificial Life systems in which populations of computational agents undergo evolution . These systems generally encode the three ingredients for evolution by natural selection (inheritance, variation, and selection) as some sort of axioms or ground rules. The presence of these ingredients means that evolution will, unavoidably,&hellip;\" class=\"encyclopedia\">Digital evolution<\/a><\/li><li>Geb<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/artificial-chemistry\/stringmol\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Stringmol is a &ldquo;string-based programming language&rdquo;, which uses encoded molecules as strings of operation code . It acts as an artificial chemistry system that displays the continuous appearance of chemical species. Stringmol has a functionality that allows probabilistic binding, which means that an interaction between molecules can occur by chance.&nbsp;Among many goals in artificial life,&hellip;\" class=\"encyclopedia\">Stringmol<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/digital-evolution\/avida\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"The Avida Digital Evolution Platform is an open-source artificial life system that has been used to conduct a wide range of studies on evolutionary dynamics . In Avida, self-replicating computer programs compete for space on a lattice of cells. When an organism reproduces, its offspring is placed in a nearby cell (or in a random&hellip;\" class=\"encyclopedia\">Avida<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/software-platforms\/symbulation\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Symbulation is an evolutionary agent-based modeling platform focused on evolving and examining symbiosis and endosymbiosis. It is open source on GitHub and has a browser-based graphical user interface as well as a command-line option. It is built with the Empirical platform. The details of the basic Symbulation organism is outlined in . Overview In Symbulation,&hellip;\" class=\"encyclopedia\">Symbulation<\/a><\/li><li>Tierra<\/li><li><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.tim-taylor.com\/paper-details\/taylor1999artificial.html\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.tim-taylor.com\/paper-details\/taylor1999artificial.html\" target=\"_blank\">Cosmos<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/software-platforms\/aevol\/\" target=\"_blank\" title='Aeovl is a digital evolution platform designed to have a genetics model that is more similar to bacterial DNA than other digital evolution platforms . The genetic code of each individual is processed through transcription and translation steps to produce a set of \"proteins\". These proteins are represented as triangles, which are combined to approximate&hellip;' class=\"encyclopedia\">Aevol<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/software-platforms\/chromaria\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Chromaria is an Artificial Life system that was designed to facilitate research on open-ended evolution. It is inspired by the hypothesis that open-ended evolution is easier to achieve when, rather than evolving along a complex fitness landscape, individuals must simply achieve some minimal criterion (MC, in the quote below) in order to be allowed to reproduce.\" class=\"encyclopedia\">Chromaria<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/software-platforms\/mabe\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"The MABE logo (source: the MABE wiki on GitHub) The Modular Agent Based Evolver framework (often referred to as MABE), is a software platform that aims to allow users to easily conduct and compare evolution experiments . MABE is open-source and available on GitHub here, which includes a wiki with helpful information.The core idea of&hellip;\" class=\"encyclopedia\">MABE<\/a><\/li><li>Boids<\/li><li><a href=\"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/software-platforms\/lenia\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Lenia is a class of continuous cellular automata systems. It was the topic of the ISAL Award for outstanding paper of 2019 and an entry in the 2018 ALife Art competition which won an honorable mention.\" class=\"encyclopedia\">Lenia<\/a><\/li><li>The Bibites<\/li><li>Physicell<\/li><li>Dishtiny<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Hard_Artificial_Life\"><\/span>Hard Artificial Life<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The following subfields and systems generally fall under hard alife:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><a href=\"https:\/\/alife.org\/encyclopedia\/introduction\/evolutionary-robotics\/\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Evolutionary robotics is a sub-field of artificial life in which evolutionary algorithms are used to evolve robot morphology (i.e. shape) and\/or behavior. Sometimes these robots exist only in simulation, while other times evolved morphologies and behaviors are translated out of the computer and into physical robots.\" class=\"encyclopedia\">Evolutionary robotics<\/a><\/li><li>Cognitive robotics<\/li><li>Florarobotica<\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What is it? Artificial Life (ALife, a-life, Alife) is a very broad field that intersects with many other fields, including biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, art, philosophy, astronomy, and more. Because of this, it is difficult to pin down an exact definition, but you can generally think of it as anything that examines the properties [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","encyclopedia-category":[101,92],"encyclopedia-tag":[],"coauthors":[89,117],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alife.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/encyclopedia\/3020"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alife.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/encyclopedia"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alife.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/encyclopedia"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alife.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/alife.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/encyclopedia\/3020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3431,"href":"https:\/\/alife.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/encyclopedia\/3020\/revisions\/3431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alife.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"encyclopedia-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alife.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/encyclopedia-category?post=3020"},{"taxonomy":"encyclopedia-tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alife.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/encyclopedia-tag?post=3020"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alife.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}