588 Mark A. Bedau
- Explain how rules and symbols are generated from physical dynamics in
living systems.
What are the potentials and limits of living systems?
- Determine what is inevitable in the open-ended evolution of life.
- Determine minimal conditions for evolutionary transitions from specific to
generic response systems. - Create a formal framework for synthesizing dynamical hierarchies at all
scales. - Determine the predictability of evolutionary manipulations of organisms and
ecosystems. - Develop a theory of information processing, information flow, and informa-
tion generation for evolving systems.
How is life related to mind, machines, and culture?
- Demonstrate the emergence of intelligence and mind in an artificial living
system. - Evaluate the influence of machines on the next major evolutionary transition
of life. - Provide a quantitative model of the interplay between cultural and biological
evolution. - Establish ethical principles for artificial life.
Some areas of artificial life are missing from the list, notably hard artificial life.
This is simply an historical accident of who attended Artificial Life VII.
2 THREE ILLUSTRATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ARTIFICIAL LIFELife exhibits complex adaptive behavior at many different levels of analysis, rang-
ing from individual cells to whole organisms, and even to evolving ecologies. One
can get a concrete feel for contemporary artificial life by considering a few illus-
trations of soft, hard, and wet artificial life. These examples illustrate artificial
life’s broad interdisciplinary nature, its synthetic methodology, and its concern
with understanding the essential properties of living systems.
Artificial cells
The holy grail of “wet” artificial life is to create artificial cells out of biochemicals
[Bedauet al., 2000; Rasmmssenet al., 2007]. Such artificial cells would be micro-
scopic autonomously self-organizing and self-replicating entities built from simple
organic and inorganic substances [Rasmussenet al., 2004]. Although artificial, for