Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology (Paperback)

It is about artifical intelligence. If you have a computer you will know exactly what I mean. When you hook up a computer, it acts alive, and you gotta interact with it like it is artifically intelligent.

Like when I hook up the voice-recognition thing where you speake into the mikerofone, it acts like it hears you too, and does what it is told to do. Sometimes that is to write a letter, or to tell it to go onto the net.

I told my computer to go onto the net once thru the mike, and it did it, as it was spoken and said what to do.

So if you read and buy this book you will learn to do this, and hook it up yourself. The book has plans and charts to do all this stuff. When you read it, pass it onto a friend, and they may help you once they read it themselves.

I gave this book 5-stars, because it was a very good one, and I will now know how my computer is so smart. I told it what to do, and it help me with this revue to. So buy it but just one time, because a friend and other people will be able to read this for free, once you give it to them.

Engines are my hobbie, and so are electronic power supplys, so I plan to use this book for that to. I will design new ones that are faster than sound, and my computer will be smart and help me with that.

So buy this book, once, and you will like it along with all the friendly people that you knowe.That's my revuiew, but I will do anew one when a new adition of the book comes out to the press.

I do recomend that you buy this one time for the people who wanto know about how artifical intelligent computers get smarter and help you with life-things you need to do, but not all by yourselfe, but with a computer.

Much of this book deals with cellular automata and the algorithms used to create them. Like so many new, perhaps revolutionary disciplines, the major players tend to be free spirits. Many of the people described here bounced around before finding their ecological niche in a-life. With the exception of the originators, John von Neumann and John Horton Conway, those who established the study of cellular automata as an academic discipline were academic outsiders who literally created it from nothing. The explanation of that is very well done. While most of the work has been done by computer, no previous knowledge is necessary to understand the text.
One item could have been better handled, but that is largely due to the problems with definitions. Like the workers in chaos, a-lifers tend to see what they want to see. For example, simple rules are used to create an image that either looks or acts like something known to be alive and this is used to argue that life is being created or that the rules that create life are simple. Which is an extremely weak argument. What is being created are items that human eyes interpret as looking like life, and as all psychologists know, the human brain processes images with a bias towards previous experience. The devil's advocate against is a shadow here. However, it is difficult to argue in the negative when you are aiming at a nebulous target.
Whatever your interest in a-life, you will find something of value in this book. Biologists and philosophers who teach general education courses will also find a good deal of discussion material. The hypothetical qualification has been removed form the debate, as there are now objects to argue about.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission