BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

ARTIFICIAL LIFE 5)

← Back

The creation of collective artificial units able to spontaneously construct complex behavioral patterns through cooperation and shared information.

Artificial life is, of course, not biological (Nothing to see with Dr. FRANKENSTEIN's creature). It is either computer modelized, or consists in devices assembled from mineral and electronic elements, which somehow mimic some living systems behavior.

The first A.L. device was Grey WALTER's Machina speculatrix, unfortunately merely considered at the time, as a kind of amusing cybernetic toy, after which it was forgotten for about 30 years (along with the French A. DUCROCQ's electronic foxes)

Artificial life is thus a quite new field of research. C. DELAYE et al in France, C. LANGTON's team in the U.S., L. STEELS in Belgium among others, are exploring "cooperation between distributed agents through self-organization" (STEELS, 1990).

Artificial life would be based, in terms of C. DELAYE and B. CORBARA on: "… reactive agents which would not possess any representation of themselves, nor of their environment and whose behavior is based on stimulus/response mechanisms" (1993, p.840)

This model is based on an analogy with some colonial animals, as for example Dictyostelium discoideum. However, until now no specific socialization factor, comparable to cyclical AMP, has been demonstrated to exist.

In any case, artificial life, just as the natural one, is basically a social phenomenon, with eventually (in the French researchers terminology) various emergent levels of complexity: collaborating reactive agents into superagents, etc… (Ibid ., p.841)

G. PASK has however argued that much of the qualities of self-organizing systems are determined by their fabric. As proteins are different from electronic chips, artificial life could be similar to natural one in the self-organizing aspects, but probably not much more than that.

→ Automaton (Learning); Parallel Distributed Processing

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

We thank the following partners for making the open access of this volume possible:

© 2020 BCSSS Contact/Imprint