ARTIFICIAL LIFE (The Seven Commandments of)
Charles François (2004). ARTIFICIAL LIFE (The Seven Commandments of), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics, 2(1): 159.
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(1) |
| ID | ◀ 159 ▶ |
| Object type | General information |
The following is a shortened synthesis of the subject as presented by C. EMMECHE (1994, p.17-22)
- “In its ambitious version, the concept of artificial life encompasses the following ideas.
- “1. The biology of possible… artificial life deals with life as it could be… Biology today is only the biology of actual life. It must become a biology of any possible life-forms .
- “2. Synthetic method . Where traditional biological research has placed emphasis on analyzing living beings and explaining them in terms of their smallest parts , the artificial-life perspective attempts to synthetize life-resembling processes or behavior in computers or other media.
- “3. Real (artificial) life. Artificial life is the study of humanly created systems that exhibit behavior characteristic of natural living systems … They are designed by us. The behavior however is produced by the artificial life itself.
- “4. All life is form . Neither actual or possible life is determined by the matter of which it is constructed. Life is a process , and it is the form of this process , not the matter , that is the essence of life.
- “These four theses are related” .
There are moreover “three additional commandments about the way in which artificial life must be constructed:
- “5. Bottom-up construction. The synthesis of artificial life takes place best via a principle of computer-based information processing called ”bottom-up programming “: at the bottom many small units and a few rules for their internal purely local interaction are defined (This is the real programming). From this interaction arises the coherent ”global“ behavior at the general level : a behavior not previously programmed according to specific rules .
- “6. Parallel processing . While information processing in a classical computer takes place sequentially … the principle for information processing in artificial life is based on a massive parallelism that occurs in real life.
(Note: i.e., reflecting the simultaneous activity of many individual elements).
- “7. Allowance for emergence . The essential feature of artificial life is that it is not predesigned in the same trivial sense as one designs a car or a robot. The most interesting examples of artificial life exhibit ”emergent behavior “.