Name: Artificial life
ISBN: 9780679743897

Artificial life

This is the startling story of a new science: the science of artificial life. Computer scientists, microbiologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and evolutionary theorists have succeeded in making creatures that look and act very much like living organisms. They grow, eat, reproduce, mutate, fight with each other, die--and do all this spontaneously, without interference from their human creators. Artificial Life is also the story of a new way of doing science, one arising not out of the laboratory but out of the computer. The power of the computer to depict--and create--emerging systems has transformed our understanding of evolution, the origins of life, and the essential dynamics of natural phenomena, enabling scientists to move beyond life-as-we-know-it to life-as-it-could-be. In the hands of a-life researchers, the computer is not merely a tool but a breeding ground. The artificial organisms that emerge will not only perform our labors but will help us crack nature's toughest codes. Eventually, we may come to grant them the autonomy due other living creatures. From one of our premier chroniclers of the computer age, the author of the classic Hackers, comes a dazzling journey into the heart of artificial life: software that utilizes the force of evolution to solve complex problems, insectlike robots designed to pave a landing area for a manned Mars mission, the use of natural selection to "train" molecules to fight the AIDS virus.

What Hacker News says

EvanAndersonJul 2026

Tierra[0], written by Tom Ray[1], immediately comes to mind. I was captivated when I read about it, as a teenager, in Steven Levy's "Artificial Life"[2]. Having played Core War[3], the description of Tierra in Levy's book inspired me to play around with making a virtual machine in Turbo Pascal and trying my hand at making a pale and naive clone. It was a lot of fun, and arguably has influenced a lot of my thinking about the origin of biological life.

[0] https://tomray.me/tierra/whatis.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_S._Ray

[2] https://www.stevenlevy.com/artificial-life

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

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EvanAndersonJul 2024

Tierra was the first thing that came to my mind, too. I'd already played with "Core War" [0] when I learned about Tierra. I so badly wanted to implement something like Tierra myself. I couldn't wrap my head around how I could identify the metes and bounds of a given "organism" to isolate it from the rest of the "soup".

At the time I learned about Tierra I didn't have a way to get at any of Ray's papers or code. Now I do, but I'd kinda forgotten about it. I really should revisit it. There's probably a lot of fun to be had there.

Aside: Steven Levy's "Artificial Life"[1] was where I learned about Tierra. That book, along with Levy's "Hackers"[2], and Gleick's "Chaos"[3] were formative books for young me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Life-Frontier-Computers-Bi...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Le...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/...

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criddellApr 2023

Somehow I got a copy of James Gleick's book Chaos and it had a big impact on me. I was kind of obsessed with chaos and fractals for a while. Right around that time a whole bunch of similar pop sci books came out and I read a bunch of them. Steven Levy's Artificial Life, a Mondo 2000 collection, John Koza's Genetic Programming, and Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg all stand out in my memory.

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mindcrimeSep 2022

That would be a long list, given that I read a lot of books and would generally say that most of the books I've read were worth investing time in to some extent. But for what it's worth, here's a subset, cribbed from my previous HN comments:

Something Deeply Hidden - Sean Carroll

The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets - Graham Farmelo

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth - Paul Hoffman

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan - Robert Kanigel

Lost in Math - Sabine Hossenfelder

The First Three Minutes - Steven Weinberg

Hyperspace - Michio Kaku

Not Even Wrong - Peter Woit

The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin

About Time - Paul Davies

Time Reborn - Lee Smolin

The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene

The Hidden Reality - Brian Greene

The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene

Quantum Space: Loop Quantum Gravity and the Search for the Structure of Space, Time, and the Universe - Jim Baggott

The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets - Graham Farmelo

Three Roads To Quantum Gravity - Lee Smolin

Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos - Seth Lloyd

Higgs - The invention and discovery of the 'God Particle' - Jim Baggott

Analogy Making As Perception - Melanie Mitchell

Society of Mind - Marvin Minsky

Engineering General Intelligence, Part 1 - Ben Goertzel

Engineering General Intelligence, Part 2 - Ben Goertzel

The AGI Revolution - Ben Goertzel

Hackers & Painters by our very own Paul "pg" Graham

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Steven Levy

The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder

Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier - Katie Hafner & John Markoff

Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology - Steven Levy

Ghost In The Wires - Kevin Mitnick

The Art of Deception - Kevin Mitnick

The Art of Intrusion - Kevin Mitnick

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

It's Not About The Bike - Lance Armstrong

Ultramarathon Man - Dean Karnazes

Charles Proteus Steinmetz: The Electrical Wizard of Schenectady - Robert Bly

Report From Engine Co 82 - Dennis Smith

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind - Al Ries, Jack Trout and Philip Kotler

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! - Al Ries and Jack Trout

Re-Positioning: Marketing in an Era of Competition, Change and Crisis by Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin

The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding - Al Ries and Laura Ries

Differentiate or Die: Survival in Our Era of Killer Competition - Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin

Marketing High Technology - William H. Davidow

Marketing Warfare - Al Ries

The Discipline of Market Leaders - Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema

Crossing The Chasm - Geoffrey Moore

How to Measure Anything - Douglas Hubbard

Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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ehsanu1Jun 2021

Bought it now! I really likes Steven Levy's "Artificial Life" as a light introduction to this world. Sadly, the book isn't too far out of date despite being 30 years old now.

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EvanAndersonDec 2020

I did a similar thing (the evolution of corewars code bit-- not the light fixture bit) after reading Steven Levy's "Artificial Life"[1] in the early 90s. The chapter on Tom Ray's Tierra[2] really excited me.

Some people say that reading Richard Dawkins caused them to become atheist. For me, it was very clearly "Artificial Life" and the code I wrote playing around w/ "evolving" Corewars code.

I managed to eek out a little "evolution" in my experimentation. I was never particularly religious to begin with. My simulation code caused me to deeply consider the power of evolution. Here was this tiny change, evolved from randomness in a minuscule virtual "petri dish", out of a tiny amount of ingredients that were brittle and unforgiving of the slightest change, on a time scale that was the smallest fraction of a fraction of the age of the universe.

Observing the sheer magnitude of the chemical "parallel computing substrate" at the scale of atoms and molecules, interacting in real time, across a space as large as the Earth, in a timescale measuring billions of years, and over a wide variety of temperature and energy gradients made me aside any concerns that all life couldn't have arisen from randomness.

I didn't need an "intelligent designer" after that. Nature, the vastness of space, the minuteness of atoms, and the overwhelming scale of time were enough.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Life-Frontier-Computers-Bi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation)

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