Reading List
This is just a tentative reading list. More material will be
posted here as the course unfolds.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Framsticks
- Philosophy of ALife
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