Introduction to Artificial Life Book

Life is so diverse and complex that is seems impossible to extract the general principles governing individual living systems. The amazing growth of the power of modern computers has opened up entirely new avenues for exploring the behavior of living systems by allowing us to design and conduct experiments with models, "Artificial Life," which may in turn lead to a set of "general principles of the living state" independent of particular implementations. Such a "theory of living systems" might be able to predict the evolution not only of worlds in which information is coded in binary strings that behave accrding to programs that have the ability to replicate, but also of the systems that gave rise to life on earth. This book and CD-ROM were developed in a lab-oriented course taught at Cal Tech in 1995 and 1996, and simultaneously augmented by "A-Life" research conducted there. The courses were attended by students from physics, computer science, and neural sciences. Prerequisites were an understanding of statistical physics, thermodynamics, and basic biology, and a familiarity with computer architectures and scientific computing techniques. The A-Life project brought together the theory of systems of self-replicating information and their experimental realization with the intent of leading us further along the road not only to uncover aspects of complex systems that have remained hidden or misunderstood because of computational difficulties, but also perhaps to discover general principles of the living state. The accompanying CD-ROM is designed to run on Windows and Unix machines. It includes the AVIDA software, along with an electronic version of the users manual; a Java applet that can be used to do Cellular Automata homework; and additional software pertaining to particular chapters in the book, such as a sandpile and a percolation program. URLs for relevant A-Life web pages and software nesting at remote servers are also provided.