Artificial Life and Evolutionary Systems

• Golly, an open-source scriptable Game of Life simulator.
• Mirek's Cellebration simulates Life and cellular automata in general.
• Avida. Self-replicating programs compete for computational resources and evolve through selection and mutatation.
• Framsticks. Three-dimensional creatures evolve in a virtual ecosystem.
• StarLogo. Educational tool for exploring the behaviors of decentralized systems (e.g., flocks of birds and traffic jams). StarLogo Models Library.
• Python: download, tutorial, documentation, official website.
• Turing machine simulator.

• IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life.
• Artificial Life. You can get a copy of any article in this journal from our library.

• Cellular Automata: A Discrete View of the World, J. Schiff, Wiley & Sons, 2008. An easy introduction. Includes material on elementary cellular automata, Turing machines, Game of Life, the density problem, genetic algorithms, Prisoner's Dilemma, Langton's ant and autonomous agents in nature.
• Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays, Volume 2: Games in Particular, E.R. Berlekamp, J.H. Conway and R. K. Guy, Academic Press, 1985. Chapter 25 is all about Life. Describes in detail how Life can be configured as a general purpose computer.
• The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge, W. Poundstone, William Morrow and Company, 1985. Popular book about Life, physics and self-reproducing machines.
• Prisoner's Dilemma, W. Poundstone, Doubleday, 1992. About John von Neumann, the Cold War and the early development of Game Theory. Related to our course only indirectly, through our look at genetic algorithms for evolving strategies to the Prisoner's Dilemma.
• An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms, M. Mitchell. MIT Press, 1996.
• The Garden in the Machine, Clause Emmeche (translated by Steven Sampson), Princeton University Press, 1994. The author, a theoretical biologist, surveys the field of artificial life. He discusses questions and objections that biologists and philosophers have in connection with the field.
• Artificial Life Models in Software, A. Adamatzky and M. Komosinski, eds., Springer-Verlag, 2005. The first two articles in the book are on Avida and Framsticks.
• The Philosophy of Artificial Life, M. A. Boden, ed., Oxford University Press, 1996.

• Control without hierarchy, D.M. Gordon, Nature, vol. 446, March, 2007.
• No Perfect Two-State Cellular Automaton for Density Classification Exists, M. Land and R. K. Belew, Physical Review Letters, volume 74, number 25, 1995, pp. 5148-5150.
• Two-state, r=1 Cellular Automaton that Classifies Density, M. S. Capcarrere, M. Sipser and M. Tomassini, Physical Review Letters, volume 77, number 24, 1996, pp. 4969-4971.
• Testing Darwin, an article on Avida in the February, 2005 issue of Discover magazine.
• Further Ant-ics, J. Propp, in The Mathematical Intelligencer, vol. 16, no. 1, 1994.
• Further Travels with My Ant, D. Gale, J. Propp, S. Sutherland, S. Troubetzkoy, in The Mathematical Intelligencer, vol. 17, no. 3, 1995.
• Complexity of Langton's ant, A. Gajardo, A. Moreira and E. Goles, Discrete Applied Mathematics, 117, pp. 41-50, 2002.

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Turing machines.
• Lifeforms: inventory of complex structures in the Game of Life.
• Game of Life news.
• Cellular automata.
• Langton's ant: definition, applets, ant man.
• Self-replicating structures: 1, 2.

Home   |   Schedule   |   Reading   |   References