History of artificial life

The idea of human artifacts being given life has fascinated humankind for as long as people have been recording their myths and stories. Whether Pygmalion or Frankenstein, humanity has been fascinated with the idea of artificial life.

Automatons were quite a novelty. In the days before computers and electronics, some were very sophisticated, using pneumatics, mechanics, and hydraulics. Early famous examples include al-Jazari's humanoid robots, and Jacques de Vaucanson's artificial duck, which had thousands of moving parts. The duck could reportedly eat and digest, drink, quack, and splash in a pool. It was exhibited all over Europe until it fell into disrepair.

However, it wasn't until the invention of cheap computing power that artificial life as a legitimate science began in earnest, steeped more in the theoretical and computational than the mechanical and mythological.

One of the earliest thinkers of the modern age to postulate the potentials of artificial life, separate from artificial intelligence, was math and computer prodigy John von Neumann. At the Hixon Symposium, hosted by Linus Pauling in Pasadena, California in the late 1940s, von Neumann delivered a lecture titled "The General and Logical Theory of Automata." He defined an "automaton" as any machine whose behavior proceeded logically from step to step by combining information from the environment and its own programming, and said that natural organisms would in the end be found to follow similar simple rules. He also spoke about the idea of self-replicating machines. He postulated a machine – a kinematic automaton – made up of a control computer, a construction arm, and a long series of instructions, floating in a lake of parts. By following the instructions that were part of its own body, it could create an identical machine. He followed this idea by creating (with Stanislaw Ulam) a purely logic-based automaton, not requiring a physical body but based on the changing states of the cells in an infinite grid – the first cellular automaton. It was extraordinarily complicated compared to later CAs, having hundreds of thousands of cells which could each exist in one of twenty-nine states, but von Neumann felt he needed the complexity in order for it to function not just as a self-replicating "machine", but also as a universal computer as defined by Alan Turing. This "universal constructor" read from a tape of instructions and wrote out a series of cells that could then be made active to leave a fully functional copy of the original machine and its tape. Von Neumann worked on his automata theory intensively right up to his death, and considered it his most important work.

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