ABSTRACT

At the Fourth Conference on Artificial Life in the summer of 1994, the evolutionary biologist Thomas S.Ray put forth two proposals.1 The first was a plan to preserve biodiversity in Costa Rican rain forests; the second was a suggestion that Tierra, his software program creating artificial lifeforms inside a computer, be released on the Internet so that it could ‘breed’ diverse species on computers all over the world. Ray saw the two proposals as complementary. The first aimed to extend biological diversity for protein-based life-forms; the second sought the same for silicon-based life-forms. Their juxtaposition dramatically illustrates the reconstruction of nature going on in the field of artificial life, affectionately known by its practitioners as Alife or simply AL. ‘The object of an AL instantiation’, Ray wrote recently, ‘is to introduce the natural form and process of life into an artificial medium’ (emphasis added).2 The lines startle. In Ray’s rhetoric, the computer codes comprising these ‘creatures’ become natural forms of life; only the medium is artificial.