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9.1

Author: Mark Ward Excerpt: Men think about sex every ten seconds, or so popular mythology would have it. Well, I have had to think about sex a good deal more than that while writing this book, so it has not been all hard work...Although sex between consenting bacteria or software programs excites few to passion it is, I hope, a fitting subject for a popular science book. .: Buy at Amazon.com :. .: Buy at Amazon.co.uk :.

I was reading several overly-academic philosophy books, and I needed a break. I had been sent Virtual Organisms a few days prior, so I picked it up and started reading it. I didn't put it down until it got accidentally packed away and shipped to the other side of the world. Five months and 4 moves later, I managed to recover it and didn't put it down again until I'd finished it!

An excellent book from cover to cover, with a Preface to entice you, excellent, varied main content, and a concluding chapter that left you thinking about yourself and the definition of human intelligence. The book covers Artificial Life from a beginner's standpoint - it does not cover the theory, just the facts. I sometimes found this a little tedious - for instance, I really wanted to know more about Thomas Ray's TIERRA from a computational standpoint. This was not a problem, though, since the Internet was riddled with TIERRA-based information.

I liked how Ward approached ALife from both a software standpoint and a hardware standpoint. I learnt a lot about hardware-based Artificial Life that I hadn't known before: adaptive circuits (FPGAs or Field Programmable Gate Arrays), British Telecom's attempts at network management through artificial "ants" (software but applied to hardware management) and Rodney Brook's subsumption architecture.

The book looks at how Artificial Life has helped biology in some respects by proving or disproving various theories of evolution. Why is sex useful? How did multicellular organisms arise? These are two very important questions that ALife is helping biologists answer. Of course, the skeptics and critics are always there complaining about the results - but it cannot be denied that Artificial Life will aid biologists study evolution more than any other upcoming science.

The best part for me was the last chapter, since it provided a sobering look at our definition of human intelligence — it could all be a sort of consensual delusion. The last chapter also details some of the problems creating a new lifeform will bring with it - how assumptions that scientists make could prove to be fatal. As Thomas Ray said:

"I believe that a true machine intelligence is likely to be fundamentally different from a human [intelligence]."