Auswahl aus der 1. Dekade mit Auszügen aus den übrigen Teilen des Werkes
Life is so diverse and complex that is seems impossible to extract the
general principles governing each individual living system. Fortunately,
however, the unrelenting growth of the power of modern computers has opened
up entirely unexpected avenues of opportunity for us in exploring the construction
of artificial living systems. This has created the possibility to design
and conduct dedicated experiments with these systems, and has generated
interest in the idea of formulating a set of "general principles of the
living state" which are quite independent of a particular implementation.
Such a "theory of living systems" might equally well-predict the outcome
of experiments performed on the protean living system which gave rise to
life on earth, e.g., and RNA world, and those worlds in which information
is coded in binary strings compiled to programs that have the ability to
self-replicate: thus and instance of "Artificial Life." This book and CD-ROM
have been developed in a lab-oriented course taught at Cal Tech in 1995
and 1996, and simultaneously augmented by ALife research conducted there.
The courses have been attended by an interdisciplinary group of students
from backgrounds in physics, computer science, and the computational neural
sciences. Pre- requisite understanding of statistical physics and thermodynamics,
basic biology, as well as familiarity with computer architectures and scientific
computing techniques are assumed. This project is an attempt to bring together
the necessary theoretical groundwork for understanding the dynamics of
systems of self-replicating information, as well as the result from initial
experiments carried out with artificial living systems based on this paradigm.
Its intent, in providing this interplay between theory and experiment,
is to lead us
