ABSTRACT
Contemporary scientists seem to be increasingly shifting their attention from the study of the composition of matter to the study of the functional characteristics of nature’s tangled systems, including the interaction between the components of a system, the interconnection of different systems and the emergence of global behaviour. Consequently, new scientific methodologies and tools are being devised for these new studies and most of them would not be possible without computer technology: scientists can now create surrogate artificial worlds in order to perform complex experiments that would otherwise be impossible. More enthusiastic academics often compare these surrogate systems to the biochemical laboratories used by scientists for centuries to investigate the structure of chemical components, cells, and so forth. The fundamental difference is that these systems are used to simulate the phenomena in question in order to study them in terms of the functional activity carried by patterns of information. The emergence of fields such as artificial life, or alife for short, is a consequence of this shift of scientific paradigm.
