Introduction to artificial life

Would a theoretical biologist be surprised to be told that computer use and software developments should help him make substantial progress in his discipline? It is doubtful. There is a long tradition of software simulations in theoretical biology to complement pure analytical mathematics which are often limited to reproducing and understanding the self-organization phenomena resulting from non-linear and spatially grounded interactions of the huge number of diverse biological objects. Nevertheless, proponents of artificial life would bet that they could help them further by enabling them to transcend their daily modelling/measuring practice by using software simulations in the first instance and, to a lesser degree, robotics, in order to abstract and elucidate the fundamental mechanisms common to living organisms. They hope to do so by resolutely neglecting much materialistic and quantitative information deemed as not indispensable. They want to focus on the rule-based mechanisms making life possible, supposedly neutral with respect to their underlying material embodiment, and to replicate them in a non-biochemical substrate. In artificial life, the importance of the substrate is purposefully understated for the benefit of the function (software should ‘supervene’ to an infinite variety of possible hardware). Minimal life begins at the intersection of a series of processes that need to be isolated, differentiated and duplicated as such in computers. Only software development and usage make it possible to understand the way these processes are intimately interconnected in order for life to appear at those crossroads.