Introduction to Artificial Life
Published on 19. April 2013
Book
Paperback/Softback
XVIII, 376 pages
978-1-4612-7231-1 (ISBN)
Description
Life is so diverse and complex that is seems impossible to extract the general principles governing each individual living system. Fortunately, however, the unrelenting growth of the power of modern computers has opened up entirely unexpected avenues of opportunity for us in exploring the construction of artificial living systems. This has created the possibility to design and conduct dedicated experiments with these systems, and has generated interest in the idea of formulating a set of "general principles of the living state" which are quite independent of a particular implementation. Such a "theory of living systems" might equally well-predict the outcome of experiments performed on the protean living system which gave rise to life on earth, e.g., and RNA world, and those worlds in which information is coded in binary strings compiled to programs that have the ability to self-replicate: thus and instance of "Artificial Life." This book and CD-ROM have been developed in a lab-oriented course taught at Cal Tech in 1995 and 1996, and simultaneously augmented by Artificial Life research conducted there. The courses have been attended by an interdisciplinary group of students from backgrounds in physics, computer science, and the computational neural sciences. Pre- requisite understanding of statistical physics and thermodynamics, basic biology, as well as familiarity with computer architectures and scientific computing techniques are assumed. This project is an attempt to bring together the necessary theoretical groundwork for understanding the dynamics of systems of self-replicating information, as well as the result from initial experiments carried out with artificial living systems based on this paradigm.
More details
Edition
Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 1998
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Research
Illustrations
XVIII, 376 p.
Dimensions
Height: 254 mm
Width: 178 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
742 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4612-7231-1 (9781461272311)
DOI
10.1007/978-1-4612-1650-6
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Christoph Adami
Introduction to Artificial Life
Book
10/1999
1st Edition
Springer
€96.00
Article exhausted; check different version
Content
1 Flavors of Artificial Life.- 1.1 Whither a Theory of the Living State?.- 1.2 Emulation and Simulation.- 1.3 Carbon-Based Artificial Life.- 1.4 Turing and von Neumann Automata.- 1.5 Cellular Automata.- 1.6 Overview.- 2 Artificial Chemistry and Self-Replicating Code.- 2.1 Virtual Machines and Self-Reproducing CA.- 2.2 Viruses and Core Worlds.- 2.3 The tierra System.- 2.4 avida, amoeba, and the Origin of Life.- 2.5 Overview.- 3 Introduction to Information Theory.- 3.1 Information Theory and Life.- 3.2 Channels and Coding.- 3.3 Uncertainty and Shannon Entropy.- 3.4 Joint and Conditional Uncertainty.- 3.5 Information.- 3.6 Noiseless Coding.- 3.7 Channel Capacity and Fundamental Theorem.- 3.8 Information Transmission Capacity for Genomes.- 3.9 Overview.- 4 Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics.- 4.1 Phase Space and Statistical Distribution Function.- 4.2 Averages, Ergodicity, and the Ergodic Theorem.- 4.3 Thermodynamical Equilibrium, Relaxation.- 4.4 Energy.- 4.5 Entropy.- 4.6 Second Law of Thermodynamics.- 4.7 Tèmperature.- 4.8 The Gibbs Distribution.- 4.9 Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics.- 4.10 First-Order Phase Transitions.- 4.11 Overview.- 5 Complexity of Simple Living Systems.- 5.1 Complexity and Information.- 5.2 The Maxwell Demon.- 5.3 Kolmogorov Complexity.- 5.4 Physical Complexity and the Natural Maxwell Demon.- 5.5 Complexity of tRNA.- 5.6 Complexity in Artificial Life.- 5.7 Overview.- 6 Self-Organization to Criticality.- 6.1 Self-Organization and Sandpiles.- 6.2 SOC in Forest Fires.- 6.3 SOC in the Living State.- 6.4 Theories of SOC.- 6.5 Overview.- 7 Percolation.- 7.1 Site Percolation.- 7.2 Cluster Size Distribution.- 7.3 Percolation in 1D.- 7.4 Higher-Dimensional Euclidean Lattices.- 7.5 Percolation on the Bethe Lattice.- 7.6 Scaling Theory.- 7.7 Percolationand Evolution.- 7.8 Overview.- 8 Fitness Landscapes.- 8.1 Theoretical Formulation.- 8.2 Example Landscapes.- 8.3 Fractal Landscapes.- 8.4 Diffusive and Nondiffusive Processes.- 8.5 RNA Landscapes.- 8.6 Fitness Landscape in avida.- 8.7 Overview.- 9 Experiments with avida.- 9.1 Choice of Chemistry.- 9.2 A Simple Experiment.- 9.3 Experiments in Adaptation.- 9.4 Experiments with Species and Genetic Distance.- 9.5 Overview.- 10 Propagation of Information.- 10.1 Information Transport and Equilibrium.- 10.2 The Artificial Life System sanda.- 10.3 Diffusion and Waves.- 10.4 Comparison: Theory and Experiment.- 10.5 Overview.- 11 Adaptive Learning at the Error Threshold.- 11.1 Information Processing at the Edge of Chaos.- 11.2 Adaptation to Computation in avida.- 11.3 Eigen's Error Threshold.- 11.4 Molecular Evolution as an Ising Model.- 11.5 The Race to the Error Threshold.- 11.6 Approach to Error Threshold in avida.- 11.7 Overview.- A The avida User's Manual.- A.1 Introduction.- A.2 A Beginner's Guide to avida.- A.3 Time Slicing and the Fitness Landscape.- A.4 Reproduction.- A.5 The Virtual Computer.- A.6 Mutations.- A.7 Installing avida.- A.8 The Text Interface.- A.9 Configuring avida Runs.- A.10 Guide to Output Files.- A.11 Summary of Variables.- A.12 Glossary.- References.