Simulating Life as a Self-Organizing and Emergent Phenomenon

This paper presents artificial life as a synthetic approach to the study of behaviors, systems and organisms. The paper starts with a discussion about the methodological advantages of using bottom-up, instead of top-down, approaches for the computational synthesis of natural behaviors. As an outcome of bottom-up modeling, the resulting behaviors synthesized are characterized by two fundamental properties: self-organization and emergence. The presentation focuses on conceptualizing and illustrating self-organization and emergence in the context of artificial life for the synthesis of behaviors. One well-known ALife project is used to promote a discussion of some implications and contributions of ALife, namely, the simulation of collective behaviors of bird flocks.