"Artificial Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

and decay. Have a genetic code, perhaps, or be the result of a process
of evolution. But there are grave problems with all of these concepts.
All these things can be done today by machines or programs. And the
concepts themselves are weak and subject to contradiction and
paradox.

Are viruses "alive"? Viruses can thrive and reproduce, but not
by themselves -- they have to use a victim cell in order to manufacture
copies of themselves. Some dormant viruses can crystallize into a
kind of organic slag that's dead for all practical purposes, and can stay
that way indefinitely -- until the virus gets another chance at
infection, and then the virus comes seething back.

How about a frozen human embryo? It can be just as dormant
as a dormant virus, and certainly can't survive without a host, but it
can become a living human being. Some people who were once
frozen embryos may be reading this magazine right now! Is a frozen
embryo "alive" -- or is it just the *potential* for life, a genetic life-
program halted in mid-execution?

Bacteria are simple, as living things go. Most people however
would agree that germs are "alive." But there are many other entities
in our world today that act in lifelike fashion and are easily as
complex as germs, and yet we don't call them "alive" -- except
"metaphorically" (whatever *that* means).

How about a national government, for instance? A
government can grow and adapt and evolve. It's certainly a very
powerful entity that consumes resources and affects its environment
and uses enormous amounts of information. When people say "Long
Live France," what do they mean by that? Is the Soviet Union now
"dead"?

Amoebas aren't "mortal" and don't age -- they just go right on
splitting in half indefinitely. Does that mean that all amoebas are
actually pieces of one super-amoeba that's three billion years old?

And where's the "life" in an ant-swarm? Most ants in a swarm
never reproduce; they're sterile workers -- tools, peripherals,
hardware. All the individual ants in a nest, even the queen, can die
off one by one, but as long as new ants and new queens take their
place, the swarm itself can go on "living" for years without a hitch or a
stutter.

Questioning "life" in this way may seem so much nit-picking
and verbal sophistry. After all, one may think, people can easily tell
the difference between something living and dead just by having a
good long look at it. And in point of fact, this seems to be the single
strongest suit of "Artificial Life." It is very hard to look at a good
Artificial Life program in action without perceiving it as, somehow,