Reply #222: it is demonstrated in computer science [View All]

daily :hi:

What is Artificial Life?
by Chris Adami and Titus Brown

The term "Artificial Life" is used to describe research into human-made systems that possess some of the essential properties of life. As it turns out, there are many such systems that meet this criterion--digital, test-tube, and mechanical--and these can be used to perform experiments aimed at revealing the principles and the organization of living systems on Earth as well as elsewhere. This effort is truly interdisciplinary and runs the gamut from biology, chemistry and physics to computer science and engineering. While a large part of Artificial Life is devoted to understanding life as we know it - that is, life on earth - a significant effort concerns the search for principles of living systems which are independent of a particular substrate. Thus, Artificial Life also considers life "as it could be", exploring artificial alternatives to a carbon-based chemistry.

Artificial Life is often described as attempting to understand high-level behavior from low-level rules; for example, how the simple rules of Darwinian evolution lead to high-level structure, or the way in which the simple interactions between ants and their environment lead to complex trail-following behavior. Understanding this relationship in particular systems promises to provide novel solutions to complex real-world problems, such as disease prevention, stock-market prediction, and data-mining on the Internet.

more...
http://www.alife7.alife.org/whatis.shtml

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