Artificial life

[3] There are three main kinds of alife,[4] named for their approaches: soft,[5] from software; hard,[6] from hardware; and wet, from biochemistry.

[10] At present, the commonly accepted definition of life does not consider any current alife simulations or software to be alive, and they do not constitute part of the evolutionary process of any ecosystem.

However, different opinions about artificial life's potential have arisen: Program-based simulations contain organisms with a "genome" language.

[12][13] In black-box models, the individual-based (mechanistic) mechanisms of a complex dynamic system remain hidden.

In contrast, a white-box model of a complex dynamic system has ‘transparent walls’ and directly shows underlying mechanisms.

All events at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of a dynamic system are directly visible at all stages of a white-box model's evolution.

The white-box modeling represents an automatic hyper-logical inference from the first principles because it is completely based on the deterministic logic and axiomatic theory of the subject.

The purpose of the white-box modeling is to derive from the basic axioms a more detailed, more concrete mechanistic knowledge about the dynamics of the object under study.

If cellular automata rules have not been formulated from the first principles of the subject, then such a model may have a weak relevance to the real problem.

In May 2019, researchers reported a new milestone in the creation of a new synthetic (possibly artificial) form of viable life, a variant of the bacteria Escherichia coli, by reducing the natural number of 64 codons in the bacterial genome to 59 codons instead, in order to encode 20 amino acids.