Alife Books

Books are good; they don't require batteries, never break down, are portable and can be borrowed from libraries if you cant afford them. It is possible to turn these pages into printed form if you so choose and may make reading the whole of this easier.

Most of these books are linked to allow you to order them directly from amazon.co.uk which is the cheapest way of buying books I know (especially in the UK). Books sales (and anything else you buy on amazon if you follow this link) help fund this site.

Virtual Organisms - Mark Ward
A new general introduction to artificial life. Presents the ideas behind the field in a very clear way.

'Creation: Life and how to make it' - Steve Grand
A Zen guide to being a digital god.

The Age of Spiritual Machines -Raymond Kurzweil
An optimistic look at the implications of the exponential growth of computing power. (Also links to this site!)

Artificial Life - Stephen Levy
A good introduction to the subject, the history and people involved. Easy to read and involving.

Artificial Life : An Overview (Complex Adaptive Systems) - Christopher G. Langton
An exploration of the the subject by one if it's pioneers.

Artificial Othology - Owen Holland, David McFarland
One problem with artificial life is an artificial environment is never real enough. In this book robotics is used to augment the virtual work already carried out.

The User Illusion - Tor Norretranders
This looks at the relationship between action and consciousness, between what the author refers to as the conscious "I" and the preconscious "me", in a wide-ranging syntheses of psychology, computer science, physics and biology.

Chaos - James Cleick
A book showing the history, effects and examples of Chaos Theory.

Artificial Life I Artificial Life II - Edited by Christopher G Langton
These volumes contain numerous papers from the Santa Fe Institute Artificial Life Workshops, the first of which was held in 1987. These volume may not be a good introduction but the include a good source of further reading. For dedicated people only.

An introduction to Neural Computing - Igor Aleksander and Helen Morton
A short book which includes most of the aspects of traditional neural computing.

The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins
Evolution brought up to date and demonstrated. In many ways this is an atheists hand book. Very well written and is, along with the selfish gene his soon to be re leased work,a book that must be read.

The Life of the Cosmos - Lee Smolin
Evolution applied to the problem of a unified theory of everything. The book puts forward some ground breaking theories and stretches the concept of 'Gaia' beyond the sphere of plant Earth and paints a picture of a Cosmos more like an ecosystem.

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Any vital reads missing? Please send comments or additions to: alife(at)stewdean(dot)com