What is Alife?

The EDGE of Life project in Second Life

By Davide Byron and Venus Jervil June 2010

The Edge of Life alife project in Second life........... 1

Introduction....... 1

Definition of alife terms along with historic references....... 1

State of the art of alife in rl....... 4

Edge of Life general aims:....... 5

Project hosting:....... 5

Current state of the project:....... 5

Future developments:....... 6

Introduction

The EDGE of Life project is currently running in Second Life as an experimental and developmental environment for the creation and study of alife - artificial life in a format that takes the mathematically based artificial life computer codes and gives them visual form, which makes them accessible to a far wider audience than was possible before the advent of the ‘virtual world’ phenomenon. Bringing alife into contact with people from different disciplines is adding a robustness and sublety to it that comes from cross-pollination of unrelated discipline idea sets. This sharing of ideas of wildly differing individuals is possible due to the global and local nature of SL. This project is also greatly enhanced by being based in a virtual world because of its ability to make the unreal real, engaging different aspects of our brains than those used only for the raw theoretical mathematics and science that lie at its roots. Very few people laugh at the comic antics of a compound fraction or a cheeky little percentage point, but it is quite usual for people to be both thrilled and amused by the interactive behaviours of the Alife organisms that populate the EDGE of Life ecosystems.

To understand a little more of what alife organisms are, here is a little background information.

Definition of alife terms along with historic references

ALIFE: cannot be defined without first looking at what we mean by life.

LIFE:

The consensus is that life is a characteristic of organisms that

exhibit all or most of the following phenomena:[8][9]

1. Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to

maintain a constant state; for example, electrolyte concentration or

sweating to reduce temperature.

2. Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more

cells, which are the basic units of life.

3. Metabolism: Transformation of energy by converting chemicals

and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing

organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain

internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other

phenomena associated with life.

4. Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than

catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts,

rather than simply accumulating matter.

5. Adaptation: The ability to change over a period of time in

response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the

process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity as

well as the composition of metabolized substances, and external

factors present.

6. Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the

contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to

complex reactions involving all the senses of higher animals. A

response is often expressed by motion, for example, the leaves of a

plant turning toward the sun (phototropism) and by chemotaxis.

7. Reproduction: The ability to produce new individual organisms

either asexually, from a single parent organism, or sexually, from at

least two parent organisms.

To reflect the minimum phenomena required, some have proposed other

biological definitions of life:

1. Living things are systems that tend to respond to changes in

their environment, and inside themselves, in such a way as to promote

their own continuation.[9]

2. A network of inferior negative feedbacks (regulatory

mechanisms) subordinated to a superior positive feedback (potential

of expansion, reproduction).[10]

3. A systemic definition of life is that living things are self-

organizing and autopoietic (self-producing). Variations of this

definition include Stuart Kauffman's definition as an autonomous

agent or a multi-agent system capable of reproducing itself or

themselves, and of completing at least one thermodynamic work cycle.[11]

or another definition:

1. Life is a pattern in spacetime, rather than a material

object. For example, most of our cells are replaced

many times during our lifetime. It is the pattern and

set of relationships that are important, rather than

the specific identity of the atoms.

2. Self-reproduction, if not in the organism itself, at

least in some related organism. (Mules are alive, but

cannot reproduce. Viruses can only reproduce with the

aid of a host.)

3. Information storage of a self-representation. For

example, contemporary natural organisms store a

description of themselves in DNA molecules, which is

interpreted in the context of the protein/RNA

machinery.

4. A metabolism which converts matter and energy from

the environment into the pattern and activities of the

organism. Note that some organisms, such as viruses,

do not have a metabolism of their own, but make use

of the metabolisms of other organisms.

5. Functional interactions with the environment. A living

organism can respond to or anticipate changes in its

environment. Organisms create and control their own

local (internal) environments.

6. Interdependence of parts. The components of living

systems depend on one another to preserve the

identity of the organism. One manifestation of this is

the ability to die. If we break a rock in two, we are

left with two smaller rocks; if we break an organism in

two, we often kill it.

7. Stability under perturbations and insensitivity to small

changes, allowing the organism to preserve its form

and continue to function in a noisy environment, or

after being subjected to minor damage.

8. The ability to evolve. This is not a property of an

individual organism, but rather of its lineage. Indeed,

the existence of a lineage is an important feature of

living systems.

Finally “This list is far from adequate—an illustration of the

poverty of our understanding. We hope that as the

field of artificial life develops, one of its

accomplishments will be to give a sharper definition of

what it means to be alive.”

BACK TO ALIFE:

Artificial life (commonly Alife or alife) is a field of study and an

associated art form which examine systems related to life, its

processes, and its evolution through simulations using computer

models, robotics, and biochemistry.[1] There are three main kinds of

alife[2], named for their approaches: soft[3], from software; hard,

from hardware; and wet, from biochemistry.

“Artificial Life” — Chris Langton

“The ‘artificial’ in Artificial Life refers to the

component parts, not the emergent processes. If the

component parts are implemented correctly, the

processes they support are genuine—every bit as

genuine as the natural processes they imitate.”

“The big claim is that a properly organized set of

artificial primitives carrying out the same functional

roles as the biomolecules in natural living systems will

support a process that will be “alive” in the same way

that natural organisms are alive. Artificial Life will

therefore be genuine life—it will simply be made of

different stuff than the life that has evolved here on

Earth.”

State of the art of alife in rl

HARD ALIFE:

The Canard Digérateur, or Digesting Duck, was an automaton in the

form of a duck, created by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739. The

mechanical duck appeared to have the ability to eat kernels of grain,

and to metabolize and defecate them. While the duck did not actually

have the ability to do this - the food was collected in one inner

container, and the feces being 'produced' from a second, so that no

actual digestion took place - Vaucanson hoped that a truly digesting

automaton could one day be designed.

WET ALIFE:

“Wet” Artificial Life

• Plant breeding, animal husbandry, and pet domestication have already

created a plethora of artificial (man-made) organisms

• Genetic engineering is already used to create more radical variations

on existing life forms, and is likely to be applied to humankind some

day

• Urey & Miller, Miller & Orgel, and Fox “primordial soup” experiments

have yielded amino acids and “protenoid” spheres

• “Test tube evolution” is used to amplify desired behaviors of

enzymes, drugs, RNA (Gerald Joyce)

• Early ALife pioneers—Norm Packard, Steen Rasmussen, Mark

Bedau—have formed ProtoLife organization, to re-evolve organic

matter from inorganic matter

• Craig Venter (Celera, sequencer of human genome) claims to have

created (and is attempting to patent) a “minimal bacterial genome”

that he deems artificial life

• MIT, Harvard, and UCSF have formed a non-profit BioBricks

Foundation to foster development and application of BioBrick

fundamental building blocks of “synthetic biology”

SOFT ALIFE:

Our alife, you can see it all around.

Edge of Life general aims:

We are bringing artificial life to Second Life, developing artificial living creatures, as part of full ecosystems that can live without needing human direction. In the very

long run, we aim to create a true life that can populate virtual worlds.

The Edge of Life is a natural evolution of the Ecosystem Working

Group and Progetto Paperella di Gomma and will increase the

level of alife in Second Life.

Project hosting:

At the moment of writing, the project is hosted mainly in the Edge of

Life parcel at Education UK sim, thanks to the kindness of Dickie

Mint who offered the land and lots of patience.

Here you can find a stable ecosystem populated with many of the most

complete and stable creatures. You're invited to interact with the

creatures living there. Experimental organisms are living in other

temporary sites at the Spencer Museum of Art and at HHP at UH and

will be migrated at the Edge of Life when they reach a stable and

secure state.

Current state of the project:

There are several organisms that have been developed to a high level, and others that are works in progress, and currently being tested and developed.

Our organisms can die, eat, reproduce, and evolve in a particular way.

Life and death is handled with a "energy" concept, organisms consume

energy by doing something (moving, reproducing...) and gain energy

by eating (various kinds of food, as of the EWG standard).

Food is nothing less than other artificial organisms. Plants, at the

base of the foodchain, gain energy from sim lag, the less there is

the more energy they get and viceversa. Higher organisms in the

foodchain predate on plants etc...

Reproduction is asexual and in most cases requires the interaction of

a user. Offspring can be exact copies of the parent or "mutated"

individuals with slightly different behaviours.

Evolution consists in entire script passing between organisms. Every

script code just a small, specialized behaviour and almost all scripts are

compatible with each other.

When a creature receives a new script from another organism, it will start using it and will acquire the new behaviour. The acquired behaviours can also be passed to

Offspring (Lamarckian evolution, different from the real world Darwinian

model, but we're in SL and we want to experiment).

We're also conducting experiments with genetic code implementations:

we have a working creature with a small genetic code (Grasserella di

gomma) and the colours of the Octopi organism are genetically inherited.

In the future such genes will have a deeper impact on organisms and

will be more rooted into each organism.

The ewg naming standard gives us the freedom to add new creatures to

ecosystem without them affecting all the other creatures. This is

possible because the standard name defines a way to identify the

creature and its abilities. So predators will know what they like to

eat and prey will know what to run away from.

The modularity of the scripts (the fact that they each implement only a

small behaviour) gives us a lot of flexibility and large code reuse

(pretty much like programming libraries in RL). To create a new

creature, it's enough to just put together a bunch of scripts in most

cases.

This also gives us the power to make organisms influence each other

at a very deep level. As already said, script passing allows organisms

to acquire new behaviours and we already observed the "from plant to

predator" pattern taking place.

This is made possible also by an intelligent management of the

standard name of creatures, to keep compatibility between each other.

Sexual reproduction with genetic crossover is also being explored and

we have a couple of organisms that are already able to use such

features, but we're still experimenting with them.

We're also developing a standard for this kind of interaction between

organisms of different species. So we'll be able to see inter-

creature reproduction, pretty much like horses and donkeys generate

mules.

This standard will go side by side with the ewg standard when it is

finished.

Future developments:

Some of the most important planned developments for the future are:

- developing a creature to creature communication system/protocol to make

them develop a "language"

- create creatures with complex bodies made up of parts with

specialized behaviours (like in all animal bodies)

- strong interaction with the environment and surroundings objects

(nest building, etc...)

-memory for the creatures, to remember food or predator position, etc...

- work with both Al and AI in the same organism

As the EDGE of Life continues to create, test and develop its alife organisms, new and exciting possibilities for research continue to present themselves. Currently operating at a small scale, there is scope for further study by others who may wish to formalise the results of the various experiments being undertaken into transferable data that may shed light on some of the unique learning potential offered by intelligent use of the SL platform as a powerful tool for scientific and educational use.