Virtual Organisms (Hardcover)

This text is a "tour d'horizon" of who is developing what artificial life around the world today. The author has interviewed the leading researchers and developers of artificial life and has some scary predictions for the directions in which they take us.;Telephone traffic is now so large that it can't be run by a single program, so BT are experimenting with various species of small "ant" programs which are autonomous and can breed and evolve better offspring by trial, error, and natural selection.;Meanwhile harmless artificial life forms are already loose on the Internet; computer viruses and even robots are now able to evolve randomly like their biological counterparts. Protein-based computers are on the agenda: a team in Japan aim to build an organic brain as clever as a puppy. The convergence of technology with biology has big implications. Artificial life today is evolving beyond even its designers' control.