ALife
ALife, or artificial life, is a concept that boasts as many
definitions as it does enthusiasts. On a very basic level, ALife is
the use of a simulated real-life environment to solve an engineering
problem. The possibilities for ALife applications can be as simple as
programming rudimentary artificial intelligence into a computer game
or as complex as designing virtual worlds where programs compete
against one another and only the strongest survive and "reproduce."
Even though ALife is an extremely new concept, it is a field
that has already attracted attention on a global scale. ALife
innovations have been responsible for break-through in medicine,
biology, ecology, meteorology, architecture, chemistry, and so on. In
fact, chances are that artificial intelligence, one of ALife's most
promising areas of research, played a big part in designing the
hardware that runs your computer.