Artificial life

As artificial life (KL, or also English AL = Artificial Life ) is called by the people according to plan created systems that share a number of properties with natural organisms.

History

The idea of artificial beings is old and a topos of myths and legends, fairy tales and legends and works between popular fiction and world literature and the art of film.

Greek mythology is full of artificial creatures, people or supermen have stood aside. In addition to the creations of the gods, the creations of artists and geniuses play a central role. Examples from the ancient world are the creatures of Hephaestus, the creatures of Daidalos and the statue of Pygmalion.

In the legends and legends of the Middle Ages appear numerous supposedly vibrant and multi-talented artificial beings. There are, for example, talking heads, some with the ability of prophecy. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, these ideas reflected in the figure of the homunculus in Faust II

In the 17th and especially the 18th century, with the breakthrough of various technical innovations, increase abruptly the machines humans and humanoid robots, whose ancestors had been admired in antiquity. In Renaissance and Baroque various machines have been developed which could partly perform complex actions. The Geneva Jacques de Vaucanson in 1738 presented an artificial flute player, and in the same year stated Jacques de Vaucanson the mechanical duck before, waddle, eat and could digest. Engineer Wolfgang von Kempelen eventually developed a chess-playing Turk, however, turned out to be a hoax.

Today we are the artificial creatures in the form of robots and software agents have become self-evident. Your Position in the History of Ideas of Artificial Life is a plausible, but by no means self-evident point of view. Also, synthetic biology allows the creation of artificial life. However, what synthetic biology is currently providing a far cry from the mythological creature described above. The focus of the research are bacteria with artificial DNA. Complex life forms such as mammals are not currently available.

General

Artificial Life (KL ) aims to implement systems and processes on your computer or other mostly non- biological media, have the qualities and skills of life. Here, some of the properties of living things could be artificially realized:

• The reproduction (or multiplication) can be done by duplicating the data structures depending on definable conditions. Similarly, the death of an individual is done by deleting the data structure depending on definable conditions. Also a (sexual) reproduction with combination of the properties of the data structures of two individuals is possible.
• Evolution can be realized by means of mutation and selection, the increase in proliferation and death. By the definition of conditions for these events results in a selection pressure.
• An exchange of information between the simulated organisms and their simulated environment and each other even allows the formation of social structures.
• Freedom of choice for simulated living being can be realized by equipping with artificial brains. For this purpose, artificial neural networks or other structures of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used.

In science, artificial life is used to investigate certain aspects of biological life closer. Here, the computer allows any modeling of structures of life and the environment. A scientific program employed to evolution of artificial life is Avida Michigan State University.

Commercial forms of artificial life are increasingly being used in computer games, for example, in the computer game Creatures, in which primitive, adaptive artificial organisms with metabolism and genome were generated. Also, the Tamagotchi has to be mentioned here.

One of the most famous very simple simulations Game of Life by John Horton Conway.

As another very common form of artificial life, computer worms and computer viruses can be referred. Both reproduction and evolution (the two conditions for artificial life ) exist in this kind of computer programs. Also already primitive ways have been developed for information exchange in computer viruses. Agency has, however, yet been discovered in any of these self-propagating code.

Special methods

Agent simulations

These simulations consist of a population of individuals who interact with each other and with their environment.

In this type of simulation result in a cellular automata structures that correspond to the properties of artificial life.

Evolutionary Algorithms

Evolutionary algorithms (computer) program processes, optimize the math problems. In this method, individual parameters of the solution (e.g., coordinates) mutated, recombined and then selected.