Artificial life, also known as alife, 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.
Artificial life researchers have often been divided into two main groups (although other groupings are possible):
The strong alife position states that "life is a process which can be abstracted away from any particular medium". (John Von Neumann). Notably the position of Tom Ray who declared that his program Tierra was not simulating life in a computer, but was synthesizing it.
The weak alife position denies the possibility of generating a "living process" outside of a carbon-based chemical solution. Its researchers try instead to mimic life processes to understand the appearance of single phenomena. The usual way is through an agent based model, which usually gives a minimal possible solution. That is: "we don't know what in nature generates this phenomenon, but it could be something as simple as..."
Artificial life as a field has had a controversial history, some have characterized it as "practical theology" or a "fact-free science". However, for many, artificial life is a meeting point for people from many other more traditional fields such as linguistics, physics, mathematics, philosophy, computer science and biology in which unusual computational and theoretical approaches that would be controversial within their home discipline can be discussed.
