If you think "artificial life" means artificial intelligence, neural nets, and androids, you're partly right. "A-Life" is a broad discipline that studies lifelike behavior in traditionally nonliving matter and systems. It involves biology, computer science, engineering, robotics, mathematics, ecology, philosophy, and God only knows how many other things.
Because interest in the field is growing so fast, the debut of the quarterly journal Artificial Life comes at a perfect time. As Editor in Chief Christopher Langton, director of the Artificial Life Program at Santa Fe Institute, explains, A-Life literally means "life made by humans rather than nature." But he adds that the discipline is too new to be constrained by short definitions.
On the whole, the journal is very cool. My favorite article in the premi�re volume is an overview that focuses on artificial life as a tool for biological study. Authors Charles Taylor and David Jefferson, both of UCLA, classify and describe biological problems they think can benefit from A-Life research. They claim new hardware, software, and wetware, for example, are getting much better at capturing the complexity of living systems, which are hard to manipulate and control in experiments. A-Life models are especially suited for studying natural evolution, the authors point out. In one recent study on sexual selection, a computer program helped show that certain propositions were true under a much broader set of circumstances than could be proved by traditional mathematical analysis.
The journal also has a BBS – Artificial Life Online – accessible via telnet, gopher, World Wide Web, or ftp. The BBS includes a discussion forum, a bibliographic database, e-mail, and a server for uploading and downloading papers and software.
Before you subscribe, bear in mind that Artificial Life is not light reading – it's a scholarly journal, after all, and it gets technical. While I was reading, my mind occasionally wandered, and I would ponder big questions like "What is life, anyway?" and "Must 'artificial death' also exist?" Unfortunately, I didn't find the answers in Artificial Life, but I did have fun searching.
Artificial Life, US$45 per year. MIT Press Journals: +1 (617) 253 2889. ftp: alife.santafe.edu, WWW site: http://alife.santafe.edu.
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