Artificial creation

Artificial Creation is a field of research that studies the primary synthesis of complex lifelike structures from primordial lifeless origins.

The field bears some similarity to artificial life, but unlike artificial life, artificial creation focuses on the primary emergence of complex structures and processes of abiogenesis. Artificial creation does not rely exclusively on the application of evolutionary computation and genetic algorithms to optimize artificial creatures or grow synthetic life forms. Artificial creation instead studies systems of rules of interaction, initial conditions and primordial building blocks that can generate complex lifelike structures, based exclusively on repeated application of rules of interaction.

An essential difference that distinguishes artificial creation from other related fields is that no explicit fitness function is used to select for fit structures. Structures exist based only on their ability to persist as entities that do not violate the system's rules of interaction. Artificial creation studies the way in which complex emergent properties can arise to form a self-organizing system.

Although concepts and elements of artificial creation are represented to some degree in many areas, the field itself is less than a decade old. There are models of self-organizing systems that produce emergent properties in biology, computer science, mathematics, engineering and other fields. Artificial creation differs from these in that it focuses on underlying properties of systems that can generate the endless environmentally interactive complexity of living systems.

One of the primary impetuses for the exploration of artificial creation comes from the realization in the artificial life and evolutionary computing fields that some basic assumptions common in these fields represent subtle mischaracterizations of natural evolution. These fall into two general classes: 1) there are fundamental problems with the use of fitness functions for the primary synthesis of complex systems, and 2) the process of self-replication used in almost all artificial life research is not a fundamental property of self-organizing systems.

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