Artificial life studies the logic of living systems in artificial environments. The goal is to study the phenomena of living systems in order to come to an understanding of the complex information processing that defines such systems.

Also sometimes included in the umbrella term Artificial Life are agent based systems which are used to study the emergent properties of societies of agents.

Artificial life (commonly Alife or alife) is a field of study and an associated art form which examine systems related to life, its processes, and its evolution through simulations using computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. There are three main kinds of alife, named for their approaches: soft, from software; hard, from hardware; and wet, from biochemistry. Artificial life imitates traditional biology by trying to recreate biological phenomena. The term "artificial life" is often used to specifically refer to soft alife.

At present, the commonly accepted definition of life does not consider any current alife simulations and softwares to be alive, and they do not constitute part of the evolutionary process of any ecosystem. However, different opinions about artificial life's potential have arisen:

• The strong alife (cf. Strong AI) position states that "life is a process which can be abstracted away from any particular medium" (John von Neumann). Notably, Tom Ray declared that his program Tierra is not simulating life in a computer but synthesizing it.

• The weak alife position denies the possibility of generating a "living process" outside of a chemical solution. Its researchers try instead to simulate life processes to understand the underlying mechanics of biological phenomena.

Techniques

• Cellular automata were used in the early days of artificial life, and they are still often used for ease of scalability and parallelization. Alife and cellular automata share a closely tied history.

• Neural networks are sometimes used to model the brain of an agent. Although traditionally more of an artificial intelligence technique, neural nets can be important for simulating population dynamics of organisms that can learn. The symbiosis between learning and evolution is central to theories about the development of instincts in organisms with higher neurological complexity, as in, for instance, the Baldwin Effect.

Artificial Life  Wikipedia

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science which aims to create it. Major AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents," where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines."

The field was founded on the claim that a central property of human beings, intelligence - the sapience of Homo sapiens - can be so precisely described that it can be simulated by a machine. This raises philosophical issues about the nature of the mind and limits of scientific hubris, issues which have been addressed by myth, fiction and philosophy since antiquity.

Artificial intelligence has been the subject of breathtaking optimism, has suffered stunning setbacks and, today, has become an essential part of the technology industry, providing the heavy lifting for many of the most difficult problems in computer science.

AI research is highly technical and specialized, so much so that some critics decry the "fragmentation" of the field. Subfields of AI are organized around particular problems, the application of particular tools and around long standing theoretical differences of opinion. The central problems of AI include such traits as reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, communication, perception and the ability to move and manipulate objects. General intelligence (or "strong AI") is still a long term goal of (some) research.

Evolutionary Art

Evolutionary Art exploits the process of evolution to create an artwork which continually changes according to an evolutionary algorithm.

In common with natural selection and animal husbandry, the members of a population undergoing artificial evolution modify their form or behaviour over many reproductive generations in response to a selective regime.

In interactive evolution the selective regime may be applied by the viewer explicitly by selecting individuals which are aesthetically pleasing. Alternatively a selection pressure can be generated implicitly, for example according to the length of time a viewer spends near a piece of evolving art.

Equally, evolution may be employed as a mechanism for generating a dynamic world of adaptive individuals, in which the selection pressure is imposed by the program, and the viewer plays no role in selection, as in the Black Shoals project.

Robot Madness: Creating True Artificial Intelligence   Live Science - March 18, 2009

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