Artificial Life Research Group

Artificial Life is a growing scientific discipline devoted to the study of artificial systems that exhibit patterns characteristic of natural living systems. The basic idea consists of abstracting the dynamic principles that underlie biological phenomena, and attempting to synthesize and study these dynamics in artificial media. This multidisciplinary field draws researchers from various horizons such as Computer Science and Biology, but also Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Economics and Philosophy.

Artificial Life addresses important questions in both fundamental and applied research. At the crossroads of Computer Science and Life Science, it acts as a bridge that encourages idea flow across these two differing disciplines. On the one hand, Artificial Life helps increase the understanding of natural biological phenomena by modelling their characteristics by computer. On the other hand, the discipline carries biological findings to Computer Science, allowing the design of bio-inspired algorithms and the development of practical applications that solve complex optimization problems.

While traditional scientific research is typically analytic, breaking down complex phenomena into their basic components, Artificial Life models are synthetic, constructing complex phenomena from their elemental units. This approach draws upon recent concepts such as self-organization (the spontaneous formation of patterns in a system due to the interaction of simple low-level elements without central control) and emergence (the apparition of new properties of a system as a whole not contained in any of its parts) in complex systems.

Ultimately, Artificial Life reaches beyond the synthesis of biomimetic artefacts and aspires to the creation of genuine new instances of life. This endeavour is based on the assumption that life is a process, i.e. property of the organization of matter, rather than a property of the matter itself. In this case, is might be possible to build artificial systems that are so life-like that they cease to be models of life and become examples of life themselves.

Current fields of investigation include

• Pattern formation of Fractals and L-systems
• Self-organization and emergence in Cellular Automata
• Swarm intelligence by means of ant algorithms
• Evolutionary computation and evolutionary art
• Population dynamics in artificial ecologies