ACM TechNews

Can We Make Software That Comes to Life?

Telegraph.co.uk (08/05/08) Highfield, Robert

A conference of 300 biologists, computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, and social scientists in Winchester, England, is focusing on the creation of a truly artificial life form. Reed College professor Mark Bedau will present the argument that research into artificial life will be a critical tool in the discovery of an as-yet undetermined mechanism in people's understanding of how complex organisms evolved. He says that although organisms breeding inside a computer is a workable concept, such systems rapidly break down because genetic possibilities are predefined. "Evolution on its own doesn't look like it can make the creative leaps that have occurred in the history of life," says conference co-organizer Seth Bullock. "It's a great process for refining, tinkering, and so on. But self-organization is the process that is needed alongside natural selection before you get the kind of creative power that we see around us." The integration of self-organization and natural selection represents biology's greatest challenge, Bullock says. At the Riken research institute, Masashi Aono and Masahiko Hara have converted a single-celled organism into a computer to solve the traveling salesman problem by tapping the amoeba's response to light. Another conference participant, Essex University's Hugo Marques, will discuss an attempt to emulate the relationship between the human brain and body by giving a robotic consciousness a skeleton to reside in.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/05/
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