thearlin@vdsvax.crd.ge.com (Thearling Kurt H) (08/24/89)
In article <12345> arshad@lfcs.edinburgh.ac.uk (Arshad Mahmood) writes: > >I was recently told by a friend of a new book entitled "Artificial Life", >it was based on the proceedings of a conference somewhere in USA. > >Does anybody know the detials, and can they reccomend it or rubbish it ? It's an interesting book. The matereial is pretty interdisiplinary and covers a lot of ground. On of my favorite chapters describes a form of Artificial Life built out of LEGO blocks. Some of the authors include K.E. Drexler, S. Hameroff, C. Schneiker, A. Lindenmayer, and others. There is a good introduction to the material written by C. Langton and there are two extensive and annotated bibliographies provided (one on Artificial Life in general and one on L-Systems). The book is volume VI in the Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. The editor is Chris Langton and the book is published by Addison-Wesley. The paperback version costs about $20 and the hardcover cost about $40 (give or take a few bucks). For further information about purchasing copies you can call A-W at 800-447-2226. The ISBN numbers are 0-201-09356-1 (paperback) and 0-201-09346-4 (hardcover). There was also an interesting overview of the conference written by Chris and published in the Spring 1988 issue of _The_Whole_Earth_ _Review_ (pp. 74-79). One of the presentations at the conference (and mentioned in the WER article but not in the book) was a system called BOIDS developed by Craig Reynolds of Symbolics (cwr@symbolics.com). It is a simulation of bird flocking but does not use any global rules. The only rules in the system are local and are applied to each boid individually. If you ever have a chance to see the film Reynolds made, do so. It is quite amazing. A reference to BOIDS is: Craig Reynolds, "Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A distributed Behavioral Model", Computer Graphics Vol 21 No 4, July 1987, pp. 25-34 Finally, there was recently an announcement for the Artificial Life II conference set for next February. If you want more info, you should probably contact Chris (his email address is cgl@lanl.gov). kurt ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Kurt Thearling 1101 W. Springfield Avenue University of Illinois Urbana, Il 61801 Coordinated Science Lab kurt@bach.csg.uiuc.edu -----------------------------------------------------------------------