Christopher Langton

Christopher Langton
Chris Langton at SFI, 1989
Born	1948/1949
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Michigan
Known for	Artificial life research

Christopher Langton (born 1948/1949) is an American computer scientist and one of the founders of the field of artificial life. He coined the term in the late 1980s when he organized the first "Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" (otherwise known as Artificial Life I) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987. Following his time at Los Alamos, Langton joined the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), to continue his research on artificial life. He left SFI in the late 1990s, and abandoned his work on artificial life, publishing no research since that time.

Langton is the first-born son of Jane Langton, author of books including the Homer Kelly Mysteries. He has two adult sons: Gabe and Colin.

Langton made numerous contributions to the field of artificial life, both in terms of simulation and computational models of given problems and to philosophical issues. He early identified the problems of information, computation and reproduction as intrinsically connected with complexity and its basic laws. Inspired by ideas coming from physics, particularly phase transitions, he developed several key concepts and quantitative measures for cellular automata and suggested that critical points separating order from disorder could play a very important role in shaping complex systems, particularly in biology. These ideas were also explored simultaneously, albeit with different approximations, by James P. Crutchfield and Per Bak among others.

While a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Langton created the Langton ant and Langton loop, both simple artificial life simulations, in addition to his Lambda parameter, a dimensionless measure of complexity and computation potential in cellular automata, given by a chosen state divided by all the possible states. For a 2-state, 1-r neighborhood, 1D cellular automata the value is close to 0.5. For a 2-state, Moore neighborhood, 2D cellular automata, like Conway's Life, the value is 0.273.