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It starts at the bottom, viewing an organism as a large population of simple machines, and works upwards synthetically from there — constructing large aggregates of simple, rule-governed objects which interact with one another nonlinearly in the support of life-like, global dynamics. The ‘key' concept in AL is emergent behavior.

— Christopher Langton

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More quotes by Christopher Langton

A system in which a few things interacting produce tremendously divergent behavior; deterministic chaos; it looks random but its not.

Christopher Langton in: Roger Lewin (1990)

You can see these two species coexisting in a long period of stability; then on of the them drops out and all hell breaks loose. Tremendous instability. That's the Soviet Union.

Christopher Langton in: Roger Lewin (1990)

The principle assumption made in Artificial Life is that the 'logical form' of an organism can be separated from its material basis of construction, and that 'aliveness' will be found to be a property of the former, not of the latter.

Rationality is very much connected with the tradition in science for the last 300 years, when you're going to end up with some sort of understandable explanation of something. And I would be disappointed if that were the case.

Artificial Life is concerned with tuning the behaviors of such low-level machines that the behavior that emerges at the global level is essentially the same as some behavior exhibited by a natural living system... Artificial Life is concerned with generating lifelike behavior.

p.4-5 as cited in: Luis M. Rocha (2012)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Christopher Langton (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.