12 Feb ’08
The name of the beast
Decided on a name for my artificial animals. Up to now I was calling them boids (after Reynolds work on flocking birds), critters (after my original professors work), and half a dozen other names, which gets confusing after a while. From now on, a single one of them will be a cra, and multiple ones will be referred to as craas.
Artificial life has been given many different names before, and I will try to maintain a species-name list here of artificial lifeforms.
First, the origin of craas: It is a reversal of an abbreviation of ARtificial Critters. As the code is written in Arc that name would have been confusing. The reversed word 'cra' sounded more as a species of animals, and happened to be part of the word Simulacra
Earlier artificial lifeforms were named:
- Boids - 1987 Craig W. Reynolds The original boids paper
- Digital Organism - 1992 Thomas Ray, An approach to the synthesis of life, In: Langton CG, Taylor C, Farmer JD, Rasmussen S (eds). Proc. of Artificial Life II, p. 371. Addison-Wesley
- Critters - 2001 Paulien Hogeweg Computing an organism: on the interface between informatic and dynamic processes
- more to be added.
Link to similar work:
http://www.msu.edu/~pennock5/research/EI.html
history:
http://devolab.cse.msu.edu/software/avida/background.php