This paper reviews the neuroscience literature to sculpt a view of intelligence from the artificial life (ALife) perspective. Three key themes are used to motivate a journey down the low road to cognition. First, the origins of brain structures and dynamics exhibit considerable emergence at phylogenic, epigenetic, and ontogenetic levels. Second, ALife complexity measures have interesting parall...

This article lists fourteen open problems in artificial life, each of which is a grand challenge requiring a major advance on a fundamental issue for its solution. Each problem is briefly explained, and, where deemed helpful, some promising paths to its solution are indicated.

Over the last several decades research efforts have explored various forms of artificial life and embodied artificial life as methods for developing autonomous agents. Such approaches, although a part of the AI canon, are rarely used in research aimed at creating artificial general intelligence. This paper explores the prospects of using in silico artificial evolution to develop machine conscio...

Can a machine reproduce? This question was posed by mathematician John von Neumann in the early 1950s and explored by him before his untimely death in 1957. Specifically he asked whether an artificial machine could create a copy of itself, which in turn could create more copies (in analogy to nature). Von Neumann wished to investigate the logic necessary for reproduction. He was not interested,...

Preface Why is the question of the difference between living and non-living matter intellectually so attractive to the man of the West? Where are our dreams about our own ability to understand this difference and to overcome it using the firmly established technologies rooted? Where are, for instance, the cultural roots of the enterprises covered nowadays by the discipline of Artificial Life? C...

Artiicial Life is partly aimed at understanding the organisation and complexity of living processes. In this paper the concept of a historical process is discussed with the aim of providing a framework with which to approach diverse phenomena in organismic, ecological, and evolutionary contexts. A historical process is such, not because it is subject to contingencies, nor because it may be expl...

We are interested in developing intelligent systems for music composition. In this paper we focus on our research into generative rhythms. We have adopted an Artificial Life (A-Life) approach to intelligent systems design in order to develop generative algorithms inspired by the notion of music as social phenomena that emerge from the overall behaviour of interacting autonomous software agents....

There has been considerable interest in computer viruses since they first appeared in 1981, and especially in the past few years as they have reached epidemic numbers in many personal computer environments. Viruses have been written about as a security problem, as a social problem, and as a possible means of performing useful tasks in a distributed computing environment. However, only recently ...

We present a swarm-based framework for designing and implementing morphogenetic artifacts that can grow, self-organize and self-repair in a fully decentralized manner. Artifacts are realized as swarms of multiple types of very simple, kinetically interacting particles with no elaborate sensing, computation, or communication capabilities. The proposed framework is based on our earlier work, Swar...