Abstract
The research in virtual reality initiated by Carl Eugene Loeffler, Research Director at SIMLAB, NASA/Robotics Engineering Consortium, Carnegie Mellon University, investigates existence within networked simulation environments. To date research efforts have been conducted in the area of tele-existence, where multiple users share or co-inhabit a common distributed space. As the research progresses, the environments have become populated by agents of varied classes: people, animals, objects, which are assigned prescribed behaviors as varied as themselves. New research directions study the nature of agents, and their emergence into the classification of life forms. Artificial life, or A-Life when assigned to agents, is the investigation of agents as actual living organisms in silico that possess the properties of living organisms in vitro. They are for all intent and purposes alive. This paper describes general direction in the growing field of agent research, and the current research conducted at SIMLAB in the area of the artificial life of agents.
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“The ultimate goal of the study of artificial life would be to create life in some other medium, ideally a virtual medium where the essence of, life has been abstracted from the details of its implementation in any particular model. We would like to build models that are so life-like that they cease to become models of life and become examples of life themselves.”
- Chris Langton, Studying Artificial Life with Cellular Automata, 1986
“The world of the made will soon be like the world of the born: autonomous, adaptable, and creative but, consequently, out of our control.”
- Kevin Kelly, Out of Control, 1994
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© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Loeffler, C.E. (1996). Artificial Life of Agents. In: Terashima, N., Altman, E. (eds) Advanced IT Tools. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34979-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34979-4_6
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