Editor's Spot (page
2)
The connection to life becomes clearer when you consider computer "viruses,"
those infections that disable a functioning system through malignant insertions
of copies of itself. Eric Matthews offers a look at artificial
life through his "Zoo" concept (enter
from our Project page), a place in cyberspace that lets you examine a variety
of alife specimens.
Biology provides the prime analogy that lets us consider these computer
critters alive through comparisons to microscopic life forms. The rules
for alife follow biological rules: they are born, they eat, they reproduce,
and they die. We can think of them as non-threatening as long as they live
in the computer, assuming that a safe distance exists between computers
and us -- a gap which narrows every day. If a cellular automata lives, albeit
on a source of energy that we control, then Sarah Farsad's
article appropriately asks whether artificial life forms can fall in love,
which presupposes that they think.
If artificial life thinks it must be on a far different level from that
of artificial intelligence. Producing an equivalent to the human brain requires
a huge investment of time and resources. The fictional account of man, mind
and machine in Galatea 2.2, assessed in a review
by Asil, relies on the art of literature to convey the
seeds of sentience. The goal of AI (language) is so diametrically opposed
to that of the squiggles and flocking of alife (behavioral), that it is
amazing that it can take so long to understand the difference.
