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Is Artificial Life alive?
Artificial Life, a community for "the cross-disciplinary study of life and its abstract processes, distinct from but cross-informed by the specific instance of life that is studied as Biology", was proposed about a year ago but has no incubator posts. From the description, artificial life is a real discipline, not something people here made up, and the scope would cover:
- Soft artificial life (software experiments)
- Hard artificial life (hardware experiments)
- Wet artificial life (biochemistry experiments)
A comment clarifies:
The field does not seek to create life, but to study the natural emergence of life in contexts other than that of existing known life. This then helps improve our understanding of natural life on Earth.
It sounds like scope isn't the problem. Do we have people here who are interested in asking and answering questions about artificial life?
1 answer
Isn't the topic more like a mixture of Software-Development, Electrical Engineering and Biology? Maybe the Artificial Life topics can be split and merged with the broader scientific topics like:
Software (-Development or -Engineering) - would be something like the game of life or maybe spreading patterns of viruses across networks etc.
Hardware (Electrical Engineering) - would be something like small robots acting as swarms, communicating and cooperate on certain tasks
Biology (to be created?) - technically "cloning" or more generally everything that was cultivated in a petri dish once, bred or genetically altered somehow
Having those topics under a "(Artificial) Life" category seems stretched to me.
EDIT: trichoplax' feedback in the comments convinced me, that the topic IS a cross-over and should be treated as such (not split up).
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