Christopher Langton

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Christopher Langton
Chris Langton at SFI, 1989
Born1948/1949
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Michigan
Known forArtificial life research

Christopher Gale Langton (born 1948/49) is an American computer scientist and one of the founders of the field of artificial life.[1] He coined the term in the late 1980s[2] when he organized the first "Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" (otherwise known as Artificial Life I) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987.[3] Following his time at Los Alamos, Langton joined the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), to continue his research on artificial life. He left SFI in the late 1990s, and abandoned his work on artificial life, publishing no research since that time.

He was profiled extensively in chapters 6 and 8 of the book Complexity (1993), by M. Mitchell Waldrop.[4]

Artificial life

Langton made numerous contributions to the field of artificial life, both in terms of simulation and computational models of given problems and to philosophical issues. Early on, he identified the problems of information, computation and reproduction as intrinsically connected with complexity and its basic laws. Inspired by ideas coming from physics, particularly

cellular automata and suggested that critical points separating order from disorder could play a very important role in shaping complex systems, particularly in biology. These ideas were also explored simultaneously, albeit with different approximations, by James P. Crutchfield and Per Bak
among others.

While a graduate student at the

Conway's Life
, the value is 0.273.

Personal life

Langton is the first-born son of

better source needed
]

Major publications
About Langton's work
  • A. GaJardo, A. Moreira, E. Goles. "Complexity of Langton's Ant". Discrete Applied Mathematics, 117, 2002.
  • M. Boden. "The Philosophy of Artificial Life". Oxford University Press, 1996.
  • Stuart Kauffman. Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Oxford University Press, 1993.
  • Melanie Mitchell, Peter T. Hraber, and James P. Crutchfield. Revisiting the edge of chaos: Evolving cellular automata to perform computations. Complex Systems, 7:89–130, 1993.
  • Melanie Mitchell, James P. Crutchfield and Peter T. Hraber. Dynamics, Computation, and the "Edge of Chaos": A Re-Examination
  • J. P. Crutchfield and K. Young, "Computation at the Onset of Chaos", in Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information, W. Zurek, editor, SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, VIII, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts (1990) pp. 223–269.

See also

References

  1. ISBN 0-262-62112-6
    .
  2. ISBN 0-444-51543-7
    . p. 585.
  3. ISBN 0-201-09346-4
    .
  4. ISBN 0-671-87234-6
    .
  5. ^ "Introduction to the Edge of Chaos". godel.hws.edu. Retrieved 2021-02-27.
  6. ^ "Chris Langton". NNDB.com. Retrieved 18 July 2012

External links

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