The point of ALife (Score 2)

1. This book seems a little over-excited or over-hyped in the review. We haven't created anything too impressive yet.
2. Alife is just about the coolest thing ever. What we are hoping to make is pretty exciting.
3. Yes, definitions of life can cause problems, but what is new about ALife is that it tries to approach everything by learning from life, rather than just introspection about how we might think or behave, which is what traditional AI is based on. It also generates artefacts that are interesting to some people because they show characteristics that had previously been thought to have been exclusively shown by "real" lifeforms.
4. I think the Turing test is totally inappropriate, since it seems to be neither necessary nor sufficient for life. If you talked for hours to a machine through a wall and believed it was a person, and then I showed you the machine, would you think it was alive?
   (...clearly it's not a necessary condition.)
5. ALife is being applied to loads of stuff, from very abstract, through scientific, engineering/robot design to entertainment. Check out http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/ezequiel/alife-pa ge/alife.html for a fairly comprehensive list of the more academic stuff.
6. I don't agree that consciousness is the vital ingredient. In fact, all I look for in a "good" experiment is interestingness.

Have a look at www.artificialworlds.net for some fun with ALife (and a touch of AI).