Artificial life: sustainable self-replicating systems

Abstract

Nature has found one method of organizing living matter, but maybe there are also other options -not yet discovered -on how to create life. To study the life as it could be is the objective of an interdisciplinary field called Artificial Life (commonly abbreviated as ALife) [1,2,3]. The word "artificial" refers to the fact that humans are involved in the creation process. The results might be completely unlike natural forms of life, not only because of their chemical composition, but even some computer programs exhibiting life-like behaviours interest ALife researchers.ALife was established at the first "Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" in Los Alamos in 1987 by Christopher G. Langton [4]. ALife is a radically interdisciplinary field that contains computer scientists, physicians, chemists, biologists, engineers, roboticists, philosophers, artists, and representatives from many other disciplines. There are several approaches to defining ALife research. One ALife sorting could be into soft, hard and wet (Figure 1). "Soft" ALife is aiming to create simulations or other purely digital constructions exhibiting life-like behaviour. "Hard" ALife is related to robotics and implements life-like systems in hardware made mainly from silicon, steel and plastic. "Wet" ALife uses all kinds of chemicals to synthesize life-like systems in the laboratory.M. Bedau, et al. [5] proposed 14 open problems in ALife in the year 2000, but none of them have been solved yet. W. Aguilar, et al.