artificial life

Chapter 2: Origins of Artificial Life

2.2 John von Neumann

John von Neumann was a man with a talent for defining abstractions. The computers that are commonplace today are considered 'von Neumann' machines because they adhere to the original abstract description that von Neumann postulated.

Von Neumann also had a strong interest in modeling the human body as a machine. His interest was derived from a field known as automata theory. He attempted to construct a bridge between automata theory and the concept of life and is thus considered the father of Artificial Life [Levy, 1992].

Von Neumann felt that all living creatures were simply incredibly complex automata. Automata are machines that have a number of states, and depending upon current states and external stimuli make transitions to a different state. A clock is a form of automata, it has a state and after each second advances that state by one second, cycling around every 24 hours.

The best evidence against automata such as clocks and watches being alive is that they are unable to reproduce themselves. Von Neumann believed that a form of automata could be created that was able to reproduce itself.

Von Neumann felt that reproduction was little more than a transfer and re-implementation of some sort of information, depending upon the organism. Since computers were nothing more than information driven machines he felt that a computer could eventually emulate life by passing its information along to a new generation of regenerating computers. Just years after von Neumann postulated this theory, Watson and Crick confirmed his beliefs when they discovered the structure and nature of DNA [Levy, 1992].

However, von Neumann was never more than a theorist in Artificial Life. He imagined an incredible creature that lived in an environment with infinite resources. The creature itself was very intricate, being made up of cells with 29 different states. At the time he envisioned this creature the technology was not available to create it. Even today the undertaking may not be possible.