Despite the popularity of artificial life over the last 15 years or so, as witnessed by the establishment of several international conferences on the subject and the birth of the Artificial Life Journal and similar publications, there has been a conspicuous lack of decent introductory texts on the subject. Notable exceptions include "Artificial Life: An Introduction" [3], an eclectic selection of papers covering a wide range of subjects that fall under the "artificial life" umbrella, and "The Philosophy of Artificial Life" [1], another collection of papers, this time dealing with the philosophical underpinnings and implications of the subject. A handful of popular science books also introduce the subject, Levy's arguably still being the best [4], but someone looking for a textbook suitable for an undergraduate or graduate course on artificial life may be disappointed.
Christoph Adami's "Introduction to Artificial Life" is a welcome attempt to help fill this gap. The text has grown out of lectures given to advanced undergraduate-and graduatelevel students in Computation and Neural Systems and in Physics at Caltech (USA) since 1995. The content will also be of value to professional researchers with an interest in the analysis of artificial evolutionary systems.
The first point to note about the text is that, despite the title, it is emphatically not a general introduction to the field of artificial life. Instead, it concentrates very specifically on introducing statistical mechanical and information theoretic techniques for analyzing evolutionary processes. In Chapter 1, Adami does give a brief introduction to the broader field, including evolution and learning in physically modeled virtual creatures, biologically inspired robotics, emergent behavior in multi-agent systems, in vitro evolution of RNA molecules, and cellular automata.
The remainder of the book is largely devoted to the introduction of a battery of theoretical approaches from the physical sciences and a discussion of their application to the analysis of evolutionary systems (both real and artificial). Subjects covered include