Life

A core tenet of the emerging field of research in living machines is that biological entities that live and act—organisms—have much in common with certain kinds of man-made entities—machines—that can display autonomous behaviour. But underlying this parallel, which is made even more persuasive by observing the life-like behaviour of many of the artifacts described in this book, are a host of critical, and still only partially answered questions. Perhaps the most fundamental of these is “what is life?” This section of the Handbook of Living Machines delves into this core question, exploring some of the most fundamental properties of living systems, such as their capacity to self-organize, to evolve, to grow, to metabolize, to self-repair, and to reproduce. This introduction provides a brief discussion about the nature of life, seen from a systems perspective, followed by summaries of each of the contributed chapters in this section.