Artificial life : an overview / edited by Christopher G. Langton.

"A Bradford book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Artificial life as a tool for biological inquiry / Charles Taylor and David Jefferson -- Cooperation and community structure in artificial ecosystems / Kristian Lindgren and Mats G. Nordahl -- Extended molecular evolutionary biology: artificial life bridging the gap between chemistry and biology / P. Schuster -- Visual models of morphogenesis / Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz -- The Artificial life roots of artificial intelligence / Luc Steels -- Toward synthesizing artificial neural networks that exhibit cooperative intelligent behavior: some open issues in artificial life / Michael G. Dyer -- Modeling adaptive autonomous agents / Pattie Maes -- Chaos as a source of complexity and diversity in evolution / Kunihiko Kaneko -- An Evolutionary approach to synthetic biology: zen and the art of creating life / Thomas S. Ray -- Beyond digital naturalism / Walter Fontana, G�unter Wagner, and Leo W. Buss -- Learning about life / Mitchel Resnick -- Books on artificial life and related topics / David G. Stork -- Computer viruses as artificial life / Eugene H. Spafford -- Genetic algorithms and artificial life / Melanie Mitchell and Stephanie Forrest -- Artificial life as philosophy / Daniel Dennett -- Levels of functional equivalence in reverse bioengineering / Stevan Harnad -- Why do we need artificial life? / Eric W. Bonabeau and Guy Theraulaz.

Artificial life, a field that seeks to increase the role of synthesis in the study of biological phenomena, has great potential, both for unlocking the secrets of life and for raising a host of disturbing issues -- scientific and technical as well as philosophical and ethical. This book brings together a series of overview articles that appeared in the first three issues of the groundbreaking journal Artificial Life, along with a new introduction by Christopher Langton, Editor-in-Chief of Artificial Life, founder of the discipline, and Director of the Artificial Life Program at the Santa Fe Institute.