ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND A-LIFE

WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSE of humanoid robots, intelligent insects and virtual creatures designed to fly real planes...

Researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial life (A-Life) make their living by modelling, copying or adapting systems from biology. The combination of human ingenuity and the explosion in computer power has created a host of creations that take as their starting point anything from human intelligence and emotions to genetic inheritance and evolution.

"Traditional" AI grew out of efforts to crack enemy codes in the Second World War. It aimed to capture human intelligence by following vast lists of rules programmed into a computer. Today, this approach is best known for creating Deep Blue, the computer that beat the chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

But this strategy has serious limitations because it seems unlikely to produce anything that really resembles human intelligence. Instead, a new wave of AI is slowly making its mark. It relies to a large extent on coaxing complex behaviours from the interaction of simple components. So, for example, networks of artificial brain cells can learn and recognise patterns. Already such neural networks are advising financial wizards about investing their money and helping doctors to diagnose cancer.

A-Life focuses not so much on human biology but on biology in its widest sense. It has already given birth to such strange things as robots that work in teams, machines that evolve and virtual creatures that learn, age, breed and die. Today, biologists study evolution in virtual worlds, computers are protected from malicious viruses by artificial immune systems, and in Oxford, a heart made from millions of software cells is teaching doctors things about medicine that no living heart could have done. Prepare to have your mind boggled...