ARTIFICIAL LIFE

http://www.ventrella.com/Alife/alife.html

About twenty years ago, when I was first thinking about starting the CFZ, I was particularly interested in the two concepts of artificial life and chaos mathematics. Admittedly I smoked an awful lot of dope at the time, but I read widely on the subjects, and was convinced that we were standing on a veritable socio-cultural precipice that would see a revolution in the natural sciences akin to the one that had happened in mathematics only a decade or so before.

Like I said, I smoked an awful lot of dope.

However, one of my favourite books in the early 1990s was Artificial Life by Stephen Levy, and it introduced me to the idea of computer programmed evolution simulators. Over the years my life changed (I stopped smoking dope) and my attitudes towards many things underwent a radical paradigm shift.

Then last night, totally by accident (and with a completely clear head) I stumbled upon ventrella.com and http://www.swimbots.com/ which is basically a simple pondlife evolution simulator and I got hooked.

I think that this is one of the most exciting things I have found in years (albeit something I read about nearly two decades ago), but then again I am a tedious old hippy who likes pondlife.

Check it out guys. Have a play with it. And let me know what you think.