Chapter 7: Artificial Life

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Artificial life, or Alife is a term coined by Chris Langton [Langton] to describe a wide variety of computational mechanisms used to model natural systems. Artificial life has been used to model agents trading resources in artificial economies, ecologies of insects , the behavior of animals, and entities negotiating with one another to study models in game theory. In this chapter, we'll investigate artificial life and then implement a simulation that demonstrates agents within a food chain competing in an artificial environment.

Introduction

While artificial life is a large discipline with a variety of concerns, we'll focus here on what is called synthetic ethology. This is defined most succinctly by Bruce MacLennan:

Synthetic ethology is an approach to the study of animal behavior in which simple, synthetic organisms are allowed to behave and evolve in a synthetic world. Because both the organisms and their worlds are synthetic, they can be constructed for specific purposes, particularly for testing specific hypotheses. [MacLennan]

Artificial life can then be described as the theory and practice for biological system modeling and simulation. One hope of researchers working with artificial life is that by modeling biological systems, we can come to a better understanding of why and how they work. Through the models, researchers can manipulate their environments to play "what if" games to understand how systems and environments respond to change.