Pattie Maes

The relatively new field of artificial life attempts to study and understand biological life by synthesizing artificial life forms. To paraphrase Chris Langton, the founder of the field, the goal of artificial life is to “model life as it could be so as to understand life as we know it.” Artificial life is a very broad discipline which spans such diverse topics as artificial evolution, artificial ecosystems, artificial morphogenesis, molecular evolution, and many more. Langton offers a nice overview of the different research questions studied by the discipline [6]. Artificial life shares with artificial intelligence (AI) its interest in synthesizing adaptive autonomous agents. Autonomous agents are computational systems that inhabit some complex, dynamic environment, sense and act autonomously in this environment, and by doing so realize a set of goals or tasks for which they are designed.