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Artificial Life
[ March 8, 2002 4:15 PM ]

Though it only got its name just over a decade ago, Artificial Life (or Alife or AL) has been around since the advent of computing, even well before if you include things like Vaucanson's mechanical duck (around 1739). ALs biggest strength and its biggest weakness is its name – if it were called "biologically-based complex adaptive systems" or similar, it would have remained just another obscure but interesting branch of science, never to be pondered over by anthropologists, cultural theorists, artists, and philosophers. Over 10 years on and we are still really no closer to Langton's claim that in 50 years time (38 now and counting) we'll have synthetic machines that can genuinely be called alive.

Today, Artificial Life is at the cross-roads. I have a suspicion it will go the way of its cousin, Cybernetics – a good set of multidisciplinary ideas that seemed promising at the time but failed to sustain and develop in the longer term. I think there are two problems:

Problem 1: AL has too many different interest groups and agendas.
AL attracts interest from theoretical biologists, computer scientists, artists, philosophers, anthropologists, game designers, newage dufuses and so on. Each group has its own interpretation and agenda for AL – sometimes they're in harmony, but often they're not. Read the first two AL conference proceedings: all the papers were visionary, (reasonably) broad and agenda setting. Everyone got the sense that they shared a common view of how living systems could be created. But a common broad view is not enough. These days each interest group has had to dig deeper into the existing areas of research set in the "early" days of AL. By going deeper each group has become less accessible and more irrelevant to each other. How much longer before major bifications occur?

Problem 2: There are no new Ideas in AL.
Take a browse through any of the main AL conference proceedings or the MIT press journal and you'll see that most things in AL fall into the following categories:

Almost all the main ideas in these areas were developed in the 1950's. This is not to suggest that no one is doing anything interesting in AL today – they are. It's just that if you're going to create systems that have any claim on being called living, then a lot more needs to be done, and that just doesn't seem possible at the moment. AL is stuck in the problems that AI had in its GOFAI days, except GOFAI at least came up with some ideas that were valuable to more general problems in computer science (has AL?). ALs greatest contribution so far may well be its synthesis approach to doing science – but even this may be traced to earlier endevours. In terms of practical results, the jury is still out. Maybe AL will undergo a renaissance in 100 years time when computing power is much greater than it is today – in the mean time my bet is that like Cybernetics, AL will become diminished over the next 10 years.

[Thanks to Alan Dorin for discussions].

Recommended Reading:

Artifical Life and Artificial Life II – Proceedings from the first two AL workshops in 1987 and 1991 held at Santa Fe.

Bonabeau, E. & G. Theraulaz: Why Do We Need Artificial Life, in Artifical Life 1(3), pp. 303-325, MIT Press, 1994.

Emmeche, C. The Garden in the Machine (English Translation by Steven Sampson), Princeton Uni. Press, 1994.

[created: October 11, 2001 5:00 PM, last modified: March 8, 2002 4:15 PM ]