Abstract
Just as artificial intelligence comes in several philosophically distinct flavors—for instance, Strong versus Weak—the discipline of artificial life can encompass a number of things, from the pragmatic use of computer simulation to explore principles of biological self-organization to meaning exactly what it says: artificial life. This chapter describes some of the factors that have motivated attempts to replicate living or lifelike processes and discusses the interplay between “design” and “emergence.”
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Notes
- 1.
Turing also made perhaps the first foray into what today are called neural networks, although the paper was decried at the time as “a schoolboy essay” by his boss at the National Physical Laboratory (who was, rather ironically, Charles Darwin, the grandson of the naturalist), and it was only published after Turing’s death.
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Grand, S. (2012). Playing God: The Historical Motivations of Artificial Life. In: Swan, L., Gordon, R., Seckbach, J. (eds) Origin(s) of Design in Nature. Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4156-0_40
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