Summary
Artificial Life (AL) can be seen as synthetic biology since it is aimed at abstracting the dynamical properties of the living and at synthesizing systems which exhibit life-like behaviors. In AL, Life is considered as a property of the organization of matter and not as a property of matter itself. This research program will allow a better understanding of such processes and properties as autopoiesis and autoreproduction, evolution and learning, morphogenesis and development, collective intelligence and the emergence of cooperative processes. It also constitutes a framework to study how these processes and properties can be combined to provide the autonomy and adaptivity characteristic of the living. Artificial Life’s experiments resort most often to systems which (rarely) evolve in (and interact with) real environments, or (most often) evolve in (and interact with) computational synthetic worlds.
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Bourgine, P., Bonabeau, E. (1998). Artificial Life as Synthetic Biology. In: Kunii, T.L., Luciani, A. (eds) Cyberworlds. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-67941-7_5
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