| Artificial Life (Computer based):
If you don’t know about Alife here is a brief description of what Artificial Life is that I shamelessly plagiarized:
“Artificial Life ("AL" or "Alife") is the name given to a new discipline that studies "natural" life by attempting to recreate biological phenomena from scratch within computers and other "artificial" media. Alife complements the traditional analytic approach of traditional biology with a synthetic approach in which, rather than studying biological phenomena by taking apart living organisms to see how they work, one attempts to put together systems that behave like living organisms.”- Chris G. Langton
So my basic question is: If a program simulates life in enough detail that it fulfills the following statement “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be a duck” should it be considered alive? Or does "life" have to be biological to be considered alive? |