Artificial life

Also known as Alife, the study of life as it can be.

Mainly divided into strong alife and weak alife. The strong alife position states that "life is a process, as such is independent from the media used to generate it" (ref??). Notably the position of Tom Ray who declared that his program Tierra was not simulating life in a computer, but was synthesizing it.

The weak alife position denies the possibility of generating a "living process" outside of a carbon-based chemical solution. Its researchers try instead to mimic life processes to understand the appearence of single phenomena. The usual way is through an agent based model, which usually gives an "as simple as" possible solution. That is: "we don't know what in nature generates this phenomenon, but could be something as simple as..."

The field is a meeting point for people of many other more traditional fields, notably: linguists, physicists, mathemathicians, philosophers, computer scientists...

Related fields and other subfields include: robotics, wet alife, artificial chemistries, clanking replicators

The field is particularly well defined by the tools it uses which tend to be: neural nets, genetic algorithms (GA), genetic programming (GP), artificial chemistries (AC), agent based models, cellular automata (CA)...

Open problems: "what is life? / when can we say that a system, or a subsytem, is alive?" ...

This fascinating field has received both positive and negative remarks: "practical theology," "the science with no facts," etc.