Thomas S. Ray
A Computational Approach to
Evolutionary Biology
Abstract:Artificial Life (AL) is the enterprise of understanding biology by constructing biological phenomena out of artificial components, rather than breaking natural life forms down into their component parts. It is the synthetic rather than the reductionist approach. I will describe an approach to the synthesis of artificial living forms that exhibit natural evolution.
The umbrella of Artificial Life is broad, and covers three principal approaches to synthesis:
in hardware (e.g., robotics, nanotechnology), in software (e.g., replicating and evolving computer programs), in wetware (e.g., replicating and evolving organic molecules, nucleic acids or others). This essay will focus on software synthesis, although it is hoped that the issues discussed will be generalizable to any synthesis involving the process of evolution.