The Artificial Life Route To Artificial Intelligence

Originally published in 1995, this volume is the direct result of a conference in which a number of leading researchers from the fields of artificial intelligence and biology gathered to examine whether there was any ground to assume that a new AI paradigm was forming itself and what the essential ingredients of this new paradigm were. A great deal of scepsis is justified when researchers, particularly in the cognitive sciences, talk about a new paradigm. Shifts in paradigm mean not only new ideas but also shifts in what constitutes good problems, what counts as a result, the experimental practice to validate results, and the technological tools needed to do research. Due to the complexity of the subject matter, paradigms abound in the cognitive sciences -- connectionism being the most prominent newcomer in the mid-1980s. This workshop group was brought together in order to clarify the common ground, see what had been achieved so far, and examine in which way the research could move further. This volume is a reflection of this important meeting. It contains contributions which were distributed before the workshop but then substantially broadened and revised to reflect the workshop discussions and more recent technical work. Written in polemic form, sometimes criticizing the work done thus far within the new paradigm, this collection includes research program descriptions, technical contributions, and position papers.

This book brings together a series of overview articles that appeared in the first three issues of the groundbreaking journal Artificial Life.

The first truly hands-on study of artificial life and its potential for synthesization by computer. Explores several definitions of life, and applies these widely divergent scientific viewpoints to such emerging fields as artificial intelligence, robotics, theoretical biology, cellular automata, and neural networks. Takes a provocative look at the future of artificial life and its implications for 21st century society. A 3.5" disk is included!

Artificial Life is a still growing interdisciplinary research field integrating a variety of different theoretical foundations, methodological positions, applications and disciplines. Main focus of this science is to abstract and to synthesize the essential features and dynamics of living systems in order to create artificial, lifelike systems. On a regular basis and from 1995 on the German Workshop on Artificial Life is organized. Like previous workshops the 6th German Workshop on Artificial Life in 2004 provided the opportunity for scientists from a broad spectrum of research areas to get in touch with their colleagues from different disciplines, to learn from one another about questions of mutual interest and to have a forum for scientists who would like to get into contact with the Artificial Life community. Contributions to the GWAL 2004 result from research efforts from (and may be of interest to) biology, physics, information and computer science, chemistry, mathematics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, robotics, socionics and much more.

Looks at the emerging field of artificial life - the product of imagination - a mix of biology, mythology and technology.

Topics include self-organization, the origins of life, natural selection, evolutionary computation, neural networks, communication, artificial worlds, software agents, philosophical issues in artificial life, ethical problems, and learning and development. Researchers in artificial life attempt to use the physical representation of lifelike phenomena to understand the organizational principles underlying the dynamics of living systems. The goal of the 1997 European Conference on Artificial Life is to provoke new understandings of the relationships between the natural and the artificial. Topics include self-organization, the origins of life, natural selection, evolutionary computation, neural networks, communication, artificial worlds, software agents, philosophical issues in artificial life, ethical problems, and learning and development.

This enthralling book alerts us to nothing less than the existence of new varieties of life. Some of these species can move and eat, see, reproduce, and die. Some behave like birds or ants. One such life form may turn out to be our best weapon in the war against AIDS. What these species have in common is that they exist inside computers, their DNA is digital, and they have come into being not through God's agency but through the efforts of a generation of scientists who seek to create life in silico. But even as it introduces us to these brilliant heretics and unravels the intricacies of their work. Artificial Life examines its subject's dizzying philosophical implications: Is a self-replicating computer program any less alive than a flu virus? Are carbon-and-water-based entities merely part of the continuum of living things? And is it possible that one day "a-life" will look back at human beings and dismiss us as an evolutionary way station -- or, worse still, a dead end?

Examining the construction, manipulation and re-definition of life in contemporary technoscientific culture, this book aims to re-focus concern on the ethics rather than on the 'nature' of artificial life.