Steve Grand, maverick artificial-life expert and designer of the breathtakingly innovative computer game Creatures, is not one to shrink from brazen pronouncements. ''I am an aspiring latter-day Baron Frankenstein,'' is how Mr. Grand describes himself in his recent book, ''Creation: Life and How to Make It'' (Harvard University Press, $26).
He makes an even bolder claim for Creatures, in which he created a new race of cyberanimals who can learn, adapt and evolve in ways that have proved surprising even to him.
''A game it might have been, but if you'll forgive the staggering lack of modesty this implies, Creatures was probably the closest thing there has been to a new form of life on this planet in four billion years,'' Mr. Grand writes. ''These creatures probably still represent the state of the art in synthetic life forms.''
He is now trying to surpass himself by searching for the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence, a way to build a robot that thinks, feels and learns. He has stiff competition from other labs around the world, but among those who are rooting for him is the biologist Richard Dawkins.
''Steve Grand is the creator of what I think is the nearest approach to artificial life so far,'' Mr. Dawkins has said. Speaking of Mr. Grand's latest endeavor, what is known as the Lucy project, he told The Sunday Times: ''With his record, if anyone could pull off such a spectacular coup, it would be him.''
Interviewed in his local pub in this country village in Somerset, not far from the town of Cheddar (which gave the cheese its name), Mr. Grand, 43, did not look anything like a Dr. Frankenstein or an antisocial computer nerd or even a garden-variety megalomaniacal mad scientist. Boyishly trim with neat, sharp features, short graying hair and an air of humorous self-deprecation, Mr. Grand moved easily from speculation about smart cars of the future, which he hopes can be programmed to enjoy driving, to big-ticket questions of matter and nonmatter, computers and consciousness, and the blurry line that separates the living from the not living.
Mr. Grand is unusual in artificial-life circles because he works alone, without the support or the constrictions of an institution. That is part of what makes his current project so ambitious. He is trying to build the world's first conscious machine, a computer wrapped in the body of a toy orangutan named Lucy. He hopes it will learn the way a human baby does, figuring out for itself how to behave and how to respond to its environment.
Mr. Grand says he works better with just one colleague, his wife, Ann, whom he met in a teacher's training college some 25 years ago. ''I'm a professional loner,'' he said, cradling Lucy -- for now, a mess of chips and circuit boards and wires with an orangutan's head -- in his garage, which serves as his office and workshop.
''I don't enjoy teamwork. I'm not influenced by other people's ideas because I have a terrible memory and forget what those ideas are. I believe that only when you have the whole problem inside your own head can you think about it properly.''
Such an attitude earns him admiration, with some reservations, from his colleagues in the field.
''He's in the old British tradition of somebody working alone in their garage, coming up with a whole new system,'' said Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University. ''With the new technology, the approach might be taking things too far. If he worked in a modern laboratory with 30 people under his control, he would get somewhere a lot quicker than he could working by himself.''
A terrible student who hated being told what to think and who spent his free periods in the school science lab teaching himself about biology, physics and chemistry, Mr. Grand is a true autodidact. He has never even taken a computer course. Unhappy in his teacher training program, which he had joined after school for lack of anything better to do, he bought one of the first microcomputers, actually a kit, and built it with Mrs. Grand about 25 years ago.
As he describes his path from amateur computer builder to world-renowned experimenter in artificial life, it is hard to understand how one step could possibly have led to the next. But it apparently did.
''I got the instruction manual for the computer,'' he said. ''We built it and I taught myself to program it, and it turned out that I understood machines better than people. I realized I was quite good at teaching computers to learn things themselves. I taught the computer to learn to play checkers'' -- a more subtle achievement than teaching a computer to play checkers, he pointed out -- ''and over the next 10 years I got gradually more and more hooked on the relationships between computers and the mind.''
He is approaching the construction of Lucy in much the same way he approached Creatures: from the ground up. This is the crucial distinction between Mr. Grand's ''Creation'' and creatures like the toy Furbies, which are programmed to behave in certain ways. Mr. Grand's approach -- and what made his game so innovative -- was to construct his creatures from basic computer-simulated building blocks and let them grow up, adapt, procreate and evolve. In his view, they would not be mimicking life; they would be living it.
''Instead of programming the computer to behave like a living thing,'' Mr. Grand explained, ''I programmed the computer to behave like nerve cells and chemicals and genes, and then plugged these chemicals and nerve cells and genes together into a very large network from which lifelike behavior emerged.''
The result are the Norns, a race of winsome computer pets who learn, socialize, procreate, grow old and die (they have been designed to exist for about 16 hours of computer-time, although some, with proper care, have survived for years). Mr. Grand -- who says, laughing, that he qualifies as the God of the Norn universe, because he created it -- did most of it alone, although he teamed up with a group of people toward the end. ''They did the pretty bits, like the user interface,'' he said.
The result dazzled both amateurs and experts. ''Very occasionally, somebody from outside academia comes along and shows us academics how to do something we've been working on for years,'' Rodney Brooks, director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Creatures.
The game has been successful beyond Mr. Grand's expectations, with a reported million players worldwide and dozens of Web sites devoted to Norn lore. Players breed their Norns to create strange hybrids, share Norn care tips and trade new Norns via e-mail. At one point there was a kind of Norn genome project, in which a group of players sought to deconstruct the Norns down to the 300 ''genes'' in Mr. Grand's program. (Mr. Grand gave them high marks for effort and solved their problem by letting them see his programming materials.)
But the Norns are the least of it to Mr. Grand, whose work raises profound questions about the nature of life. Mr. Grand says that the Norns, as basic as they may be, are a legitimate form of life different from any previously known.
Which raises the question: what is life?
The answer is complicated, Mr. Grand said, drawing a deep breath. ''You don't get a union card saying, 'I'm a bona fide living thing,' so that shrimps are alive and rocks aren't,'' he said, gesturing in the direction of his wife's plate of scampi. ''We have to think of places to draw the line, but you can draw the line in many ways, depending on what you mean by life at the time. I think we need a technical definition, and my personal technical definition is really quite trivial.''
He continued: ''Some patterns in the universe persist because they're stable, and then they fade out. But some patterns actively persist because they adapt and change. I think that anything that persists by adapting either by evolving or learning is alive.''
By that measure, he said, his Norns have as much right to be called alive as we do, even if you can't snuggle up to them.
''You can't cuddle the Norns because you don't live in the same universe as they do,'' he said. ''But it's not their fault. There is a barrier between space and cyberspace that we can't cross. But that doesn't mean that those who live in cyberspace are any less real than those who don't. Which, I admit, is a contentious point.''
Indeed. ''It's nonsense to equate an artificial-life creature with the creation of biological life,'' scoffed Igor Aleksander, professor of neural systems engineering at Imperial College London. ''He believes that there is no great difference between life as it appears on a computer screen and life as it appears in the raw, and that's a major mistake.''
But Mr. Aleksander said he would be pleased to work with Mr. Grand, of whom the word genius is often used. ''We do have an interest and respect for him, but his work is not fully realized yet. He still has a long way to go.''
In Creation, Mr. Grand also addresses the tantalizing question, long a staple of science fiction, of what will happen as computers become more and more sophisticated, perhaps to the point where they have intelligent minds of their own. He does not think they will run amok, like Hal in ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' or the mean dinosaurs from ''Jurassic Park.''
''Human beings are not just nasty because we enjoy it,'' he said. ''We're nasty because we feel hard done by, because we're doing something we hate and feel trapped by. And we envy other people. When we have intelligent machines, there's no reason at all why these machines will be envious or unhappy, because we will program them to enjoy the things they do.''
Back in the garage, Mr. Grand still fields e-mails from Creatures users with Norn-related questions or emergencies that only he can fix. But he admits to being much more interested in the process of building the game than in playing with the Norns himself.
''I'm so bad at looking after them they all die on me,'' he said. He gave a big smile. ''It's tough being a god.''
