--- layout: default --- Publication details An Alternative Approach to the Synthesis of Life Tim Taylor 2002 Abstract This work concerns the creation of a computational environment that could support the origin and open-ended evolution of artificial life. It is argued that most previous attempts in this area, from John von Neumann to Tom Ray, and others (many of whom have doubtlessly been inspired by the work of Richard Dawkins) have placed too much emphasis on the careful engineering of individual organisms to act as seeds for an evolutionary process. In particular, these attempts often regard the process of self- replication as a major design issue; at the same time, they tend to pay little attention to the design of the environment and the way in which organisms interact with it. An alternative, and very different, approach to the topic is presented, inspired in part by the theoretical work of Howard Pattee. In this approach, the ability of genotypes to self-replicate is taken for granted. Rather, the emphasis is much more on the environment and the processes that it supports; it is assumed that the environment has its own dynamics and self-organisational properties, and that genomes can "sculpt" these dynamics by supplying constraints. Genomes that generate local dynamics that promote their own stability and reproductive success will, by definition, survive, and thereby serve as the seeds of an evolutionary process. A simple model is introduced to exemplify these ideas. Initial results suggest that the appearance of genome-regulated self-stabilising dynamics (a major aspect of the origin of life) is a robust feature of the model. The model also has desirable properties for long-term open-ended evolution. Full text Poster: pdf Reference Taylor, T. (2002). An Alternative Approach to the Synthesis of Life. Poster presented at the 8th International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (ALIFE 8), Sydney, Australia. BibTeX @misc{taylor2002alternative, author = {Taylor, Tim}, title = {An Alternative Approach to the Synthesis of Life}, howpublished = {Poster presented at the 8th International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (ALIFE 8), Sydney, Australia}, month = dec, year = {2002}, category = {poster}, keywords = {evoca, meaning} } Related publications
  1. Taylor, T. (2009). A Creative Dance: Symbols, Action and the Bringing Forth of Meaning. In M. Boden, M. D’Inverno, & J. McCormack (Eds.), Computational Creativity: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Retrieved from http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2009/2207
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  2. Taylor, T. (2004). Redrawing the Boundary between Organism and Environment. In J. Pollack, M. A. Bedau, P. Husbands, R. A. Watson, & T. Ikegami (Eds.), Artificial Life IX: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (pp. 268–273). https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/1429.003.0045
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  3. Taylor, T. (2003). Evolving Interaction in Artificial Systems: An historical overview and future directions. In P. McOwan, K. Dautenhahn, & C. L. Nehaniv (Eds.), Abstracts from the Evolvability and Interaction Symposium, held at Queen Mary, University of London, UK, in October 2003. University of Hertfordshire Computer Science Technical Report No. 393.
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  4. Taylor, T. (2003). Sensor Evolution in Artificial Systems: Towards a more appropriate model of the relationship between organism and environment. In J. F. Miller, D. Polani, & C. L. Nehaniv (Eds.), Abstracts from the Evolvability and Sensor Evolution Symposium, held at University of Birmingham, UK, in April 2003. University of Hertfordshire Computer Science Technical Report No. 384.
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  5. Taylor, T. (2002). The Control of Dynamical Systems by Evolved Constraints: A New Perspective on Modelling Life (Informatics Research Report No. EDI-INF-RR-0148). University of Edinburgh.
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