ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the fast-developing field of artificial life, stressing aspects especially relevant for the study of decentralized market economies. Artificial life (alife) is the bottom-up study of basic phenomena commonly associated with living organisms, such as self-replication, evolution, adaptation, selforganization, parasitism, competition, and cooperation. Alife researchers study complex adaptive systems sharing many of the following characteristics. Most importantly, each such system typically consists of many dispersed units acting in parallel with no global controller responsible for the behavior of all units. Alife research tends to focus on continually evolving systems whose global behavior arises from the local interactions of distributed units; this is the sense in which alife research is said to be bottom up. The central problem for economic alife researchers is to understand the apparently spontaneous appearance of regularity in economic processes, such as the unplanned coordination of trading activities in decentralized market economies that economists associate with Adam Smith's invisible hand.
