ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

1. Artificial Life Forms generated by a computer program 2. Tom Ray's Tierra Artificial Life and World -less graphical but no less revealing 3. Conway's Game of Life-cellular automata, Life created on a Grid A ONE-PAGE DEFINITION OF LIFE Prologue Until a few decades ago, most people thought they knew what it meant to say that something was alive. Breathing, eating, the ability to reproduce, having a shape, existing in a time-space dimension etc were some of the characteristics which defined Life. Until the advent of computers and programmers who wrote code that could also perform most of the things which living things do. And that has led people [like me] to re-evaluate the meaning of saying that you are a living thing. It was John von Neumann, who first thought of self-reproducing cellular automata, and inspired John Conway, Chris Langton, Tom Ray, and Stephen Wolfram, John Holland and countless others to institute the study and creation of entities that exhibited life-like be...

Noise can mean much more than 'unwanted' audio signals. Noise can be defined as information that is not useful for your purpose at a certain point in time. It can be audio information, visual information or even olfactory [smell] or gustatory [taste] information. In this sense a frequent encounter with Noise is a part of daily Life. Here are some instances of Noise and how it is filtered: 1. When looking for a location or directions on a map, you have to choose the map with the appropriate scale. If you are traveling from Florida to New Jersey on a non-stop journey, a regional map showing the main highways is the one that is most useful. Detailed maps of each State are not necessary. The small county roads, the streets in each town are all Noise. 2. When getting familiar with a city, it pays to visualize the basic layout of it' s major streets first, and to ignore the rest temporarily. For example, anyone who wants to get to know Manhattan in New York City would first note ...