Artificial Life
Created | Updated Mar 7, 2002
Not to be mistaken for Artificial Intelligence, ALife tries to take a wider perspective. Artificial Life is to Artificial Intelligence as Artificial Intelligence is to Computer Science. It's highly cool.
Some background...
AI has been around pretty much since the start. It tends to be hammered out by computer scientists and mathematicians because it's based around logic. You have things called facts in your head which you jiggle around using logical reasoning until you have a solution.
It works best when
- It knows the complete state of the world.
- It knows how everything works.
This is why games like chess are big targets for AI guys.
The field of ALife has its roots more in biology and physics. It sprang out when the penny dropped that maybe the model of intelligence as some disembodied computer was not such a good one after all. People were (and some still are) reluctant to let go of the idea of intelligence being a matter of computational speed and memory.
Swarms of 'em..
The classic ALife simulation is of a whole bunch of little triangles swarming around inside a window with some apparent motive. This could be escaping from a evil red triangle or foraging for green triangles. Their behavior will either have been programmed in the form of a few simple rules, or they will have arrived at them through some adaptive process.
