Overview

Contemporary scientists seem to be increasingly shifting their attention from the study of the composition of matter to the study of the functional characteristics of nature's tangled systems, including the interaction between the components of a system, the interconnection of different systems and the emergence of global behaviour. Consequently, new scientific methodologies and tools are being devised for these new studies and most of them would not be possible without computer technology: scientists can now create surrogate artificial worlds in order to perform complex experiments that would otherwise be impossible. More enthusiastic academics often compare these surrogate systems to the biochemical laboratories used by scientists for centuries to investigate the structure of chemical components, cells, and so forth. The fundamental difference is that these systems are used to simulate the phenomena in question in order to study them in terms of the functional activity carried by patterns of information. The emergence of fields such as artificial life, or alife for short, is a consequence of this shift of scientific paradigm.

Alife is a discipline that studies natural living systems by simulating some of their biological aspects in silico (Langton, 1997). The attempt to mimic biological phenomena on computers is proving to be a viable route for a better theoretical understanding of living organisms, let alone the practical applications of biological principles for technology (robotics, nanotechnology, etc.) and medicine. Because alife deals with such complex phenomena, its development has fostered the development of a pool of...