Artificial Life, kno any books?

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newbie56k

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does anyone know any good links or books about artifical life?

Artificial life is the study of artificial systems that exhibit behavior characteristic of natural living systems. It is the quest to explain life in any of its possible manifestations, without restriction to the particular examples that have evolved on earth. This includes biological and chemical experiments, computer simulations, and purely theoretical endeavors. Processes occurring on molecular, social, and evolutionary scales are subject to investigation. The ultimate goal is to extract the logical form of living systems.
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if you don't know what artifical life is go here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life
 
Its a strange field in that its really the combination of a few fields, all of which have easily accessible books. Look up some books on the following subjects:

1. Simulation - Every artificial life takes place within some sort of simulation, whether it be as simple as Conway's Game of Life, or a full 3D environment.
2. Genetic Algorithms - Usually the life part comes into play with the introduction of genetic algorithms, MANY books on this.
3. Genetic Programming - Related to #2, but not the same. Usually used stack based programming languages in order to give your agents some sort of intelligence

Start from there - these are the most important fields.

-AntonK
 
i recently found a really intersting site called e cell

http://www.e-cell.org/

E-Cell Project is an international research project aiming to model and reconstruct biological phenomena in silico, and developing necessary theoretical supports, technologies and software platforms to allow precise whole cell simulation.
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u can simulate a cell, but requires lots of programming to really understand.

i believe that i have a lot to learn still (damn). artificial life is really intersting. :)

if anyone knos more books or suggestion plz post.
 
The game Creatures is a really good example of artificial life. The guy who created the game, Stephen Grand, wrote a book about artificial life called Creation. Not only does he talk about artificial life in the book, but he also explains the ideas behind how he came to create the game. It's a really great read for beginning interest into alife.

Also, it might help you out to just hop on to something like amazon and search "artificial life"... any of those books will probably give you some good insight.

I came across a nice artificial life links page the other day. It has some interesting stuff on it. http://www.alcyone.com/max/links/alife.html

Finally, there's an Alife blog that posts some interesting things. http://www.greythumb.org/blog/

Hope that helps you out.
 
I should have mentioned this before as well. If you don't want to mess around with building a simulation environment, having to code your own physics engine, etc etc, then take a look at some research done by a guy name Jon Klein.

The environment is called Breve, its a combination 3D environment and programming language. It allows you to easily develop 3D simulations (or 2D) with complex creature interactions. Check it out, its easy to learn and has lots of tutorials.

http://www.spiderland.org/breve/

I've used it for several projects. One of them hopefully is being published very soon.

-AntonK
 
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