Artificial Life

This course aims at giving an overview of the field of Alife and introduce both
practical tools and theoretical ideas relevant for the understanding of the emergence
life-like behaviors in various media. In particular, we will attempt to cover the following topics.
- What is life, goals of Alife, history of the field.
- Central examples: Von Neumann's self-reproducing machine, the Game of Life: zoology of objects, theorems and open problems; Quines; Langton's loop; Turing's reaction-diffusion models; KdV Equation; Smooth Life and Lenia, Neural Cellular Automata;
- Discrete cellular automata: basic theorems on cellular automata (reversibility, locality, Turing completeness); rule space; Wolfram's classification, latticegas models.
- Continuous cellular automata: reaction-diffusion models, pattern formation, discretization's, solitons, chaos.
- Computational theory: Turing machines, quines and the Kleene's fixed point theorem, applications to self-reproduction, program/hardware tradeoff, Turing completeness in discrete and continuous media.
- Soliton theory: examples, scattering transforms, conservation laws.
- Genetic information: mathematical models; evolution, mutation, and selection; error correction; genetic algorithms; error threshold and Eigen's paradox