Artificial Life: where art, science, and computing meet in a very groovy way. I became hooked on Artificial Life after reading about Boids, a program that simulated the flocking behaviour of birds, with a twist: it had no code that told it how to make birds flock.

Applet by Conrad Parker

Instead, each bird in the simulation followed a few simple rules, such as don't crowd the birds closest to you, fly in the general direction of other birds, etc., and when all of the birds were randomly placed together, the flocking behaviour emerged naturally.

The point:

Simple local interactions between agents in a system, such as a biological, economic, or social system, can lead to complex global behaviours that are often surprising and unpredictable.

So instead of trying to create a complex model of a system, in order to understand it, create simple models of the agents in the system, and let them do the work. The link between nature and mathematics has always fascinated me, the way in which relatively simple computational algorithms can reproduce natural, life-like, organic behaviour.

Quite often the visual representation of these algorithms can be very beautiful.

The use of evolutionary algorithms, where darwinian rules are used to evolve solutions to a problem, is also part of Artificial Life.