Artificial LIfe

• I think of ALife as intimately related to genetic algorithms, but it occurs to me that it is a lot more than that.
• The simple game of life simulations from the 50s and 60s count.
• The ALife Wiki has a definition of sorts (alife studies the logic of living systems in artificial environments) but that doesn't seem to fit with the way I use it.
• I guess it's about systems with lots of relatively simple individuals (agents), that interact and reproduce according to some relatively simple rules.
• It's hoped that the agents change over time so that they get better or that some sort of desired behaviour emerges from the set of agents.
• In a real sense, the Sims is alife.
• The Wiki states that ALife includes hardware and wetware studies. We're going to confine our discussion to software.