Medical What is the significance of artificial life in today's technology landscape?

[masudr]

Has anyone here heard of artificial life?

It is a growing discipline where the idea is a bottom-up approach of starting with lots and lots of simple systems, and hoping they evolve to show emergent structures. This is at odds with artificial intelligence which is a top-down approach of analysing existing intelligent systems and trying to copy some of their properties (such as information analysis).

There has been some research going on in this area since the mid-80s, but almost all projects I have read about have been unsatisfactory to me for their lack of generality.

I have started a little project myself to try and get artificial life through evolving Turing machines. You might want to take a look: http://projectdionysus.wordpress.com/

Thanks,
Masud

 

[neurocomp2003]

of course...artificial life is fun to program and think of. FLocks and boids in a rts game environment are cool.