Reading List

This is just a tentative reading list. More material will be posted here as the course unfolds.

1. Introduction
   • Artificial Life by C. G. Langton. This article lays out the goals and prospects of ALife. It is a broad survey, easy to read without any specialized background. Langton, a biologist, is one of the founders of the field. The article was first published in the Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (1987), but an updated version appears as Chapter 1 in the book Philosophy of Artificial Life, Oxford University Press, 1996. (Read sections 1, 3 and 4.)
   • Artificial Life, N.H. Packard and M. A. Bedau, in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, vol. 1, pp. 209-215, Macmillan, 2003.
   • Artificial Life , M.A. Bedau, in Handbook of the Philosophy of Science. Volume 3: Philosophy of Biology, M. Matthen and C. Stephens, eds., Elsevier, 2007. (Read section 1.)
   • Brief introduction to models of computation.
2. Langton's Ant
   • Dynamical Behavior and Complexity of Langton's Ant, A. Moreira, A. Gajardo, E. Goles, Complexity, Vol. 6, N.4, pp. 46-51, 2001.
3. Game of Life
   • We will use a Game of Life simulator called Golly, which allows us to script our own experiments using Python, a popular object-oriented programming language. So you will need to learn a little bit of Python. The online Python tutorial is the best place for that. Read chapter 3 and the following sections: 4.1-4.6, 5.1 (not including 5.1.3 - 5.1.4), 5.3, 6.1 (and the preceding paragraphs) and 7.2. That should be enough for our purposes, although you might be interested to see how classes are implemented in Python (chapter 9).
4. Self-Replicating Structures
   • Self-Reproduction in Cellular Automata, C.G. Langton, Physica D, vol. 10, 1984.
   • Simple Systems That Exhibit Self-Directed Replication, J.A. Reggia, S.L. Armentrout, H. Chou, Y. Peng, Science, vol. 259, February, 1993.
5. Genetic Algorithms
   • Chapter 27 (Sorting Networks) in Introduction to Algorithms, 2e, T.H. Cormen, C.E. Leiserson, R.L. Rivest, and C. Stein, MIT Press and McGraw-Hill, 2002.
   • Chapter 5 (Implementing a Genetic Algorithm) in An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms, M. Mitchell. MIT Press, 1996.
   • Co-Evolving Parasites Improve Simulated Evolution as an Optimization Procedure, W.D. Hillis, in Artificial Life II, C.G. Langton, C. Taylor, J.D. Farmer and S. Rasmussen, eds. Addison-Wesley, 1992.
6. Avida
   • Computer Recreations: In the game called Core War hostile programs engage in a battle of bits, A.K. Dewdney, in Scientific American, May, 1984.
   • Introduction to Avida (online tutorial)
   • The Evolutiononary origin of complex features, R. E. Lenski, C. Ofria, R.T. Pennock, C. Adami, in Nature, vol. 423, 2003, pp. 139-145.
7. Framsticks
   • The World of Framsticks: Simulation, Evolution, Interaction, M. Komosinski, Proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Virtual Worlds (VW2000), Paris, France, July 2000, pp. 214-224.
8. Philosophy of ALife
   • TBA

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