What is Life ? A History of Conceptions from Myths of Creation to Artificial Life

2002 ◽  
pp. 339-361
Author(s):  
Jouko Seppänen
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Life ◽  
History Of

Computer Creativity in the Automatic Design of Robots

Leonardo ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan B. Pollack ◽  
Gregory S. Hornby ◽  
Hod Lipson ◽  
Pablo Funes
Keyword(s):  
Control Systems ◽  
Artificial Life ◽  
Physical Simulation ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Robotic Systems ◽  
Truss Structures ◽  
Rapid Manufacturing ◽  
Automatic Design ◽  
History Of

This article demonstrates the possibility that robotic systems can automatically design robots with complex morphologies and tightly adapted control systems at a low cost. These automatic designs are inspired by nature and achieved through an artificial coevolutionary process to adapt the bodies and brains of artificial life-forms simultaneously through interaction with a simulated reality. Through the use of rapid manufacturing, these evolved designs can be transferred from virtual to true reality. The artificial evolution process embedded in realistic physical simulation can create simple designs often recognizable from the history of biology or engineering. This paper provides a brief review of three generations of these robots, from automatically designed LEGO structures, through the GOLEM project of electromechanical systems based on “truss” structures, to new modular designs that make use of a generative, DNA-like representation.

Eighteenth-Century Wetware

2003 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Riskin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Artificial Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

This essay explores a similarity between the way people approached the relation of life to machinery during the second half of the eighteenth century, and the way they have been exploring this relation during the second half of the twentieth century and turn of the twenty-first. The essay describes a moment of intense interest in producing artificial life, from the 1730s to the 1790s, examines what set the projects of this moment apart from previous and subsequent ways of conceiving the relations between animal and artificial machinery,and closes with some speculation about the similarity between the two epochs in the history of artificial life, then and now.

“Life Is a Verb”: Inflections of Artificial Life in Cultural Context

2007 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Helmreich
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Artificial Life ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Verb Inflections

This review essay surveys recent literature in the history of science, literary theory, anthropology, and art criticism dedicated to exploring how the artificial life enterprise has been inflected by—and might also reshape—existing social, historical, cognitive, and cultural frames of thought and action. The piece works through various possible interpretations of Kevin Kelly's phrase “life is a verb,” in order to track recent shifts in cultural studies of artificial life from an aesthetic of critique to an aesthetic of conversation, discerning in the process different styles of translating between the concerns of the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and sciences of the artificial.

Introduction: Selectionist Reasoning as a Tool of Thought

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Ziman
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Artificial Life ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Organic Evolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Selective Retention ◽  
Adaptive Nature ◽  
Cultural Entities

This chapter focuses on a new mode of metascientific reasoning that applies the underlying rationale of Charles Darwin's explanation of the ‘Origin of Species’ to many other examples of historical change. More specifically, it examines the ‘evolutionary paradigm of rationality’ which can be summed up in the formula: BVSR = Blind Variation + Selective Retention. It shows how selection in reasoning applies to the changing membership of a population, rather than to changes that might be taking place in any particular member of that population; how the adaptive nature of the Darwinian process results in a population whose members are more ‘fit’ — that is, better able to satisfy the criteria of selection; and the essentially naturalistic nature of evolutionary reasoning. It also discusses bio-organic evolution as a classic example of a Darwinian process; the concept of ‘artificial life’ in relation to many evolutionary phenomena; the evolution of primitive human artefacts and other cultural entities; and the application of evolutionary reasoning to the history of science. The chapter concludes by looking at evolutionary reasoning as a ‘tool of thought’.

Nature, Technology and Art: The Emergence of a New Relationship?

Leonardo ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ursula Huws
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Genetic Engineering ◽  
Artificial Life ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

The three-way relationship between nature, technology and the human subject has been a problematic and shifting one in the history of Western art and thought. In this article, the author begins by summarizing this history, pointing to the inadequacy of most theoretical accounts in the face of the growing interpenetration of the “natural” by the “technological” resulting from such developments as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. The author goes on to argue that the convergence between scientific developments in the field of artificial life and the emergent art movement points to the development of a new understanding of this relationship and a new role for the artist.

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