Science Fair Project Encyclopedia Artificial life, also known as
alife or a-life, is the study of life through the use of human-
made analogs of living systems. Computer scientist Christopher
Langton coined the term in the late 1980s when he held the first
"International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of
Living Systems" (otherwise known as Artificial Life I) at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987. Nature of the field
Although the study of artificial life does have some significant
overlap with the study of artificial intelligence (AI), the two
fields are very distinct in their history and approach.
Organized AI research began early in the history of digital
computers, and was often characterized in those years by a "top-
down" approach based on complicated networks of rules. Students
of alife did not have an organized field at all until the 1980s,
and often worked in isolation, unaware of others doing similar
work. Where they concerned themselves with intelligence at all,
researchers tended t