Introduction to Artificial Life

This book and CD-ROM have been developed in a lab-oriented course taug ht at Cal Tech in 1995 and 1996, and simultaneously augmented by ALife research conducted there. The courses have been attended by an interd isciplinary group of students from backgrounds in physics, computer sc ience, and the computational neural sciences. This project is an attem pt to bring together the necessary theoretical groundwork for understa nding the dynamics of systems of self-replicating information, as well as the result from initial experiments carried out with artificial li ving systems based on this paradigm. Its intent, in providing this int erplay between theory and experiment, is to lead us further along the road to discover not only the general principles of the living state, but also to uncover aspects of this complex system that has remained h idden, or misunderstood, because of the impossibility to heretofore pe rform dedicated experiments.