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  • Artificial Life IX: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems
  • Stefaan Van Ryssen
Artificial Life IX: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systemsedited by Jordan Pollack et al.MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2004. 600 pp., illus. Paper. ISBN: 0-262-66183-7.

Artificial Life (AL) has never been and probably never will be the art of re-creating life in a test tube, even if the tabloids and some conservative lobbies want the public to believe it is, in the hope of selling more copies or winning more souls. Instead, in the words of editor Jordan B. Pollack, AL is:

the study of the organizational principles of life, rather than the study of carbon-based life as it exists on Earth. Some of the fundamental questions of AL are:

  • What are the principles of evolution, learning and growth that can be understood well enough to simulate as an information process?

  • Can robots be built faster and cheaper by mimicking biology than by the product design process used for automobiles and airplanes?

  • What kind of constraints should be placed on sciences, such as "Wet A Life," which work with self-replicating elements?

  • What components of physics and chemistry support emergence and automatic discovery of physical and cognitive mechanisms of life forms?

  • How can we unify theories from dynamical systems, game theory, evolution, computing, geophysics, and cognition? (p. xii).

This certainly is a tall order, but research done by the scientists who attended the Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Artificial Life in Boston in 2004 testifies to its feasibility---in the long run. No less than 97 papers were selected for presentation and published in the proceedings.

It is hard to find any trends or even highlights in this highly entropic collection. The papers organized themselves alphabetically by author's name in nine subfields, so it is not surprising that the subfield Self-Organization has caught the eye of the popular scientific press --considering also that it delivers some spectacular results such as self-replicating machines (in the work of Efstathios Mytilinaios et al).

The subfields of Robotic Studies, Formal Games and Automata, Artificial Chemistries, and Evolutionary and Adaptive Dynamics are evidently blooming, as they take up more than half of the contributions, but it was in "Language, Brain, Culture" and "Art and Philosophy" that I found the least technical, although certainly not always the most accessible, material. "Language" in this context is not to be taken as the highly sophisticated communications systems we colloquially use but rather as a set of simple rules and a few words, the evolution of which is studied in a computer-simulated environment. This says it all. Artificial Life studies nowadays consist mostly of mathematical and statistical analysis of emergent properties of very simple computer-dwelling entities, fitted with a neural network and evolving by means of a genetic algorithm in a highly simplified environment. The majority of the papers here include just these elements: evolution, emergent behavior or emergent properties and contextual or environmental restraints. From these principles, which are articulated in very different ways, very divergent effects can be seen to arise: from the expression of desire to the recognition of the shape of objects to the emergence of grammar.

This being the proceedings of a conference, most papers are highly technical and require a good understanding of the typical language of neural networks and genetic algorithms, and a background in at least the basics of Artificial Life or the older science of Artificial Intelligence. On the other hand, this is not a book one wants to read from cover to cover. Browsing through it, reading an abstract here and a paper there, will allow one to catch a glimpse of a most fascinating field of discovery.

Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent, Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium. E-mail: <stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be>.

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