The Past, Present, and Future of Artificial Life

Wendy Aguilar,Carlos Gershenson,Guillermo Santamarã­A-Bonfil,Tom Froese

doi:10.3389/frobt.2014.00008

Wendy Aguilar, Carlos Gershenson + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2014.00008

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Abstract

For millennia people have wondered what makes the living different from the non-living. Beginning in the mid-1980s, artificial life has studied living systems using a synthetic approach: build life in order to understand it better, be it by means of software, hardware, or wetware. This review provides a summary of the advances that led to the development of artificial life, its current research topics, and open problems and opportunities. We classify artificial life research into fourteen themes: origins of life, autonomy, self-organization, adaptation (including evolution, development, and learning), ecology, artificial societies, behavior, computational biology, artificial chemistries, information, living technology, art, and philosophy. Being interdisciplinary, artificial life seems to be losing its boundaries and merging with other fields.

Highlights

For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata have an artificial life? [our emphasis]
The term artificial life (ALife) was coined in the late 1980s by Langton (1989), who originally defined it as “life made by man rather than by nature,” i.e., it is the study of man-made systems that exhibit behaviors characteristic of natural living systems
Current ALife research can be classified into the 14 themes summarized in the rest of this section: origins of life, autonomy, self-organization, adaptation, ecology, artificial societies, behavior, computational biology, artificial chemistries, information, living technology, art, and philosophy

Summary

Introduction

In spite of these many antecedents, it is commonly accepted [see, for example, Bedau (2003)] that it was not until 1951 that the first formal artificial life (ALife) model was created, when von Neumann (1951) was trying to understand the fundamental properties of living systems. In the 1960s, Beer (1966) developed a model for organizations based on the principles of living systems.

Results

Conclusion