Clergyman's

A system in which a few things interacting produce tremendously divergent behavior; deterministic chaos; it looks random but its not.
- Christopher Langton

A system in which a few things interacting produce tremendously divergent behavior; deterministic chaos; it looks random but its not.
- Christopher Langton

views life as a property of the organization of matter, rather than a property of the matter which is so organized. Whereas biology has largely concerned itself with the material basis of life, Artificial Life is concerned with the formal basis of life.
- Christopher Langton

It starts at the bottom, viewing an organism as a large population of simple machines, and works upwards synthetically from there — constructing large aggregates of simple, rule-governed objects which interact with one another nonlinearly in the support of life-like, global dynamics. The ‘key' concept in AL is emergent behavior.
- Christopher Langton

Artificial Life is the name given to a new discipline that studies ""natural"" life by attempting to recreate biological phenomena from scratch within computers and other ""artificial"" media. Alife complements the traditional analytic approach of traditional biology with a synthetic approach in which, rather than studying biological phenomena by taking apart living organisms to see how they work, one attempts to put together systems that behave like living organisms.
- Christopher Langton