Working mostly alone, almost single-handedly writing 250,000 lines of computer code, Steve Grand produced Creatures®, 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, Creation plumbs 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.
Steve Grand is 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.
Table of Contents
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
What People are Saying About This
Rodney Brooks
Very occasionally somebody from outside academia comes along and shows us academics how to do something we've been working on for years. Steve Grand showed us how to build a universe of evolving creatures, without the prevailing academic biases. This delightful book is a fresh and inspiring account of how to succeed in creating artificial life. Rodney Brooks, Director, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT
Douglas Adams
A giant leap forward into a new and unknown world...awe-inspiring. Douglas Adams, on the computer game Creatures