Artificial Life as a Tool for Biological Inquiry

1993 ◽  
Vol 1 (1_2) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Taylor ◽  
David Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Artificial Life ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Grand Challenge ◽  
Open Problems ◽  
Maintenance Of Sex ◽  
Open Questions ◽  
Shifting Balance ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Natural Life

Artificial life embraces those human-made systems that possess some of the key properties of natural life. We are specifically interested in artificial systems that serve as models of living systems for the investigation of open questions in biology. First we review some of the artificial life models that have been constructed with biological problems in mind, and classify them by medium (hardware, software, or “wetware”) and by level of organization (molecular, cellular, organismal, or population). We then describe several “grand challenge” open problems in biology that seem especially good candidates to benefit from artificial life studies, including the origin of life and self-organi- zation, cultural evolution, origin and maintenance of sex, shifting balance in evolution, the relation between fitness and adaptedness, the structure of ecosystems, and the nature of mind.

scholarly journals Social Learning and Cultural Evolution in Artificial Life

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Marriott ◽  
James M. Borg ◽  
Peter Andras ◽  
Paul E. Smaldino
Keyword(s):  
Social Learning ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Artificial Life ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Open Questions

We describe the questions and discussions raised at the First Workshop on Social Learning and Cultural Evolution held at theArtificial Life Conference 2016 in Cancún, Mexico in July 2016. The purpose of the workshop was to assemble artificial life researchers interested in social learning and cultural evolution into one group so that we could focus on recent work and interesting open questions. Our discussion related to both the mechanisms of social learning and cultural evolution and the consequences and influence of social learning and cultural evolution on living systems. We present the contributions of our workshop presenters and conclude with a discussion of the more important open questions in this area.

Thirty Years of Computational Autopoiesis: A Review

2004 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry McMullin
Keyword(s):  
Research Program ◽  
Artificial Life ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Basic Question ◽  
Santa Fe ◽  
Open Problems ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
Humberto Maturana ◽  
Distinctive Role

Computational autopoiesis—the realization of autopoietic entities in computational media—holds an important and distinctive role within the field of artificial life. Its earliest formulation by Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, and Ricardo Uribe was seminal in demonstrating the use of an artificial, computational medium to explore the most basic question of the abstract nature of living systems—over a decade in advance of the first Santa Fe Workshop on Artificial Life. The research program it originated has generated substantive demonstrations of progressively richer, lifelike phenomena. It has also sharply illuminated both conceptual and methodological problems in the field. This article provides an integrative overview of the sometimes disparate work in this area, and argues that computational autopoiesis continues to provide an effective framework for addressing key open problems in artificial life.

scholarly journals Open Problems in Artificial Life

2000 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Bedau ◽  
John S. McCaskill ◽  
Norman H. Packard ◽  
Steen Rasmussen ◽  
Chris Adami ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Life ◽  
Grand Challenge ◽  
Major Advance ◽  
Fundamental Issue ◽  
Open Problems

This article lists fourteen open problems in artificial life, each of which is a grand challenge requiring a major advance on a fundamental issue for its solution. Each problem is briefly explained, and, where deemed helpful, some promising paths to its solution are indicated.

Living architecture: workshop report from the European Conference on Artificial Life, Lyon, France, 4 September 2017

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin M Hanczyc ◽  
Barbara Imhof ◽  
Andrew Adamatzky
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Neural Networks ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Artificial Life ◽  
Feedback Loops ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Workshop Report ◽  
European Conference ◽  
Open Questions ◽  
The Future

Imagine evolving swarms of robots interacting and by doing so reshaping and cultivating our habitat. This habitat could be here on Earth, on a distant planet or moon, or within a self-contained spacecraft. What would these robots look like and made of what type of material? What kind of information, hardware or software? What are the architectural necessities? There are many open questions when trying to envision the future of architecture; but, in this particular workshop, the goal was not only to imagine the future but also to create it. With this particular goal in mind, the Living Architecture workshop at European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL) 2017 brought together practitioners from the sciences and architecture to share ideas and technologies to examine possible paths forward. Living Architecture is a specific substantiation of the broader notion of Living Technology where living systems or artificial systems with life-like properties are developed towards technological applications. In Living Architecture, objects designed in the built environment would contain living systems as part of their functionality (such as bioreactors for energy) or artificial distributed systems with feedback loops (such as neural networks or artificial intelligence). In this way, Living Architecture represents a congruence in functionality and form between living systems, technology and architecture.

scholarly journals Emergence of Organisms

Entropy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (10) ◽  
pp. 1163
Author(s):  
Andrea Roli ◽  
Stuart A. Kauffman
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Adaptive Behavior ◽  
Artificial Life ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Evolution Of Life ◽  
High Level ◽  
Hostile Environments

Since early cybernetics studies by Wiener, Pask, and Ashby, the properties of living systems are subject to deep investigations. The goals of this endeavour are both understanding and building: abstract models and general principles are sought for describing organisms, their dynamics and their ability to produce adaptive behavior. This research has achieved prominent results in fields such as artificial intelligence and artificial life. For example, today we have robots capable of exploring hostile environments with high level of self-sufficiency, planning capabilities and able to learn. Nevertheless, the discrepancy between the emergence and evolution of life and artificial systems is still huge. In this paper, we identify the fundamental elements that characterize the evolution of the biosphere and open-ended evolution, and we illustrate their implications for the evolution of artificial systems. Subsequently, we discuss the most relevant issues and questions that this viewpoint poses both for biological and artificial systems.

General discussion after session V

1988 ◽  
Vol 325 (1587) ◽  
pp. 611-618 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Time Perspective ◽  
Applied Mathematics ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Organic Chemical ◽  
General Terms ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Emergence Of Life

N. C. Wickramasinghe ( Department of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy, University College, Cardiff, U. K. ). The question of the origin of life is, of course, one of the most important scientific questions and it is also one of the most difficult. One is inevitably faced here with a situation where there are very few empirical facts of direct relevance and perhaps no facts relating to the actual transition from organic material to material that can even remotely be described as living. The time perspective of events that relate to this problem has already been presented by Dr Chang. Uncertainty still persists as to the actual first moment of the origin or the emergence of life on the Earth. At some time between 3800 and 3300 Ma BP the first microscopic living systems seem to have emerged. There is a definite moment in time corresponding to a sudden appearance of cellular-type living systems. Now, traditionally the evolution of carbonaceous compounds which led to the emergence of life on Earth could be divided into three principal steps and I shall just remind you what those steps are. The first step is the production of chemical building blocks that lead to the origin of the organic molecules necessary as a prerequisite for the evolution of life. Step two can be described in general terms as prebiotic evolution, the arrangement of these chemical units into some kind of sequence of precursor systems that come almost up to life but not quite; and then stage three is the early biological evolution which actually effects the transition from proto-cellular organic-type forms into truly cellular living systems. The transition is from organic chemistry, prebiotic chemistry to biochemistry. Those are the three principal stages that have been defined by traditional workers in the field, the people who, as Dr Chang said, have had the courage to make these queries and attempt to answer them. Ever since the classic experiments where organic materials were synthesized in the laboratory a few decades back, it was thought that the first step, the production of organic chemical units, is important for the origin of life on the Earth, and that this had to take place in some location on the Earth itself.

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