Working mostly alone, almost single-handedly writing 250,000 lines of computer code, Steve Grand produced Creaturesandreg;, a revolutionary computer game that allowed players to create living beings complete with brains, genes, and hormonal systems--creatures that would live and breathe and breed in real time on an ordinary desktop computer. Enormously successful, the game inevitably raises the question: What is artificial life? And in this book--a chance for the devoted fan and the simply curious onlooker to see the world from the perspective of an original philosopher-engineer and intellectual maverick--Steve Grand proposes an answer.

From the composition of the brains and bodies of artificial life forms to the philosophical guidelines and computational frameworks that define them, Creationplumbs the practical, social, and ethical aspects and implications of the state of the art. But more than that, the book gives readers access to the insights Grand acquired in writing Creatures--insights that yield a view of the world that is surprisingly antireductionist, antimaterialist, and (to a degree) antimechanistic, a view that sees matter, life, mind, and society as simply different levels of the same thing. Such a hierarchy, Grand suggests, can be mirrored by an equivalent one that exists inside a parallel universe called cyberspace.

When Steve Grand developed his artificial-life computer game Creaturesnine years ago, he never dreamed that 1 million people would play it and come to care deeply about the lives of their virtual pets. Creaturesallowed players to design these pets, or norns, and observe how they interacted with their environment and with other norns. The norns have computer-simulated hormones and DNA. They eat and breed. They fall in love. According to Grand's book Creation..."Creatureswas probably the closest thing there has been to a new form of life on this planet in four billion years." That's a pretty startling claim, but as Grand explains in his strangely accessible and consistently surprising book, whether or not you believe it depends on your definition of what's alive. Grand--now two years into building a 4-month-old robot orangutan named Lucy--argues that our traditional notion of life is just now beginning to change.

"Grand's book is an excellent place to enter one of the more exciting areas of twenty-first-century science.

John L. Casti, Nature [UK]"

A giant leap forward into a new and unknown world...awe-inspiring.

[Creationis] the latest word on computer intelligence, from the designer of a popular computer game...On the whole, Grand succeeds in providing useful hints to computer-savvyreaders without drowning laymen in details of programming. At the same time, he gives an entertaining glimpse of the game itself, with descriptions of 'Ron,' the first creature he programmed for the computer game. Smoothly written andthought-provoking--worth a look for anyone curious about computer intelligence.

Steve Grand is the creator of what I think is the nearest approach to artificial life so far, and his first book, Creation, is as interesting as you would expect. But he illuminates more than just the properties of life; his originality extends to matter itself and the very nature of reality.

Working mostly alone, almost single-handedly writing 250,000 lines of computer code, Steve Grand produced Creatures(R), a revolutionary computer game that allows players to create living beings complete with brains, genes, and hormonal systems--creatures that live and breathe and breed in real time on an ordinary desktop computer. Enormously successful, the game inevitably raises the question: What is artificial life? And in this book--a chance for the devoted fan and the curious onlooker to see the world from the perspective of an original philosopher-engineer and intellectual maverick--Steve Grand proposes an answer.

Steve Grandis co-founder and former director of technology at <>Creature Labs, a firm based in the United Kingdom. He has written and lectured widely on the topic of artificial life and was nominated by the Sunday Times(of London) as one of "The Brains behind the 21st Century." His latest research objective is to build the world's first conscious machine.

Acknowledgements

Introduction: A latter-day Frankenstein

1. Failing the test

2. Lies, damned lies and linguistics

3. A guide to the intangible

4. Levels of being and the general scheme of things

5. The importance of being emergent

6. Looking-glass worlds

7. They call me Legion; for I am many

8. On the balance of nature

9. God's Lego set

10. The whole iguana

11. Igor, hand me that screwdriver...

12. I am Ron's brain

13. Three parts gin to one of vermouth

14. Taking over the world

15. Vapourware

Bibliography

Index