| One of the earliest thinkers of the modern age to postulate the potentials of artificial life, separate from [[artificial intelligence]], was math and computer prodigy [[John von Neumann]]. At the [[Hixon Symposium]], hosted by [[Linus Pauling]] in [[Pasadena, California]] in the late 1940s, von Neumann delivered a lecture titled "The General and Logical Theory of Automata." He defined an "automaton" as any machine whose behavior proceeded logically from step to step by combining information from the environment and its own programming, and said that natural organisms would in the end be found to follow similar simple rules. He also spoke about the idea of [[self-replicating machine]]s. He postulated a machine – a [[kinematic automaton]] – made up of a control computer, a construction arm, and a long series of instructions, floating in a lake of parts. By following the instructions that were part of its own body, it could create an identical machine. He followed this idea by creating (with [[Stanislaw Ulam]]) a purely logic-based automaton, not requiring a physical body but based on the changing states of the cells in an infinite grid – the first [[cellular automaton]]. It was extraordinarily complicated compared to later CAs, having hundreds of thousands of cells which could each exist in one of twenty-nine states, but von Neumann felt he needed the complexity in order for it to function not just as a self-replicating "machine", but also as a [[universal computer]] as defined by [[Alan Turing]]. This "[[Von Neumann universal constructor|universal constructor]]" read from a tape of instructions and wrote out a series of cells that could then be made active to leave a fully functional copy of the original machine and its tape. Von Neumann worked on his [[automata theory]] intensively right up to his death, and considered it his most important work. | | One of the earliest thinkers of the modern age to postulate the potentials of artificial life, separate from [[artificial intelligence]], was math and computer prodigy [[John von Neumann]]. At the [[Hixon Symposium]], hosted by [[Linus Pauling]] in [[Pasadena, California]] in the late 1940s, von Neumann delivered a lecture titled "The General and Logical Theory of Automata." He defined an "automaton" as any machine whose behavior proceeded logically from step to step by combining information from the environment and its own programming, and said that natural organisms would in the end be found to follow similar simple rules. He also spoke about the idea of [[self-replicating machine]]s. He postulated a machine – a [[kinematic automaton]] – made up of a control computer, a construction arm, and a long series of instructions, floating in a lake of parts. By following the instructions that were part of its own body, it could create an identical machine. He followed this idea by creating (with [[Stanislaw Ulam]]) a purely logic-based automaton, not requiring a physical body but based on the changing states of the cells in an infinite grid – the first [[cellular automaton]]. It was extraordinarily complicated compared to later CAs, having hundreds of thousands of cells which could each exist in one of twenty-nine states, but von Neumann felt he needed the complexity in order for it to function not just as a self-replicating "machine", but also as a [[universal computer]] as defined by [[Alan Turing]]. This "[[Von Neumann universal constructor|universal constructor]]" read from a tape of instructions and wrote out a series of cells that could then be made active to leave a fully functional copy of the original machine and its tape. Von Neumann worked on his [[automata theory]] intensively right up to his death, and considered it his most important work. |
| Philosophy scholar [[Arthur Burks]], who had worked with von Neumann (and indeed, organized his papers after Neumann's death), headed the Logic of Computers Group at the [[University of Michigan]]. He brought the overlooked views of 19th century American thinker [[Charles Sanders Peirce]] into the modern age. Peirce was a strong believer that all of nature's workings were based on logic (though not always deductive logic). The Michigan group was one of the few groups still interested in alife and CAs in the early 1970s; one of its students, [[Tommaso Toffoli]] argued in his PhD thesis that the field was important because its results explain the simple rules that underlay complex effects in nature. Toffoli later provided a key proof that CAs were [[Reversible computing|reversible]], just as the true universe is considered to be. | | Philosophy scholar [[Arthur Burks]], who had worked with von Neumann (and indeed, organized his papers after Neumann's death), headed the Logic of Computers Group at the [[University of Michigan]]. He brought the overlooked views of 19th century American thinker [[Charles Sanders Peirce]] into the modern age. Peirce was a strong believer that all of nature's workings were based on logic (though not always deductive logic). The Michigan group was one of the few groups still interested in alife and CAs in the early 1970s; one of its students, [[Tommaso Toffoli]] argued in his PhD thesis that the field was important because its results explain the simple rules that underlay complex effects in nature. Toffoli later provided a key proof that CAs were [[Reversible computing|reversible]], just as the true universe is considered to be. |