Creation: Life and How to Make It Paperback – 30 May 2003

In recent years the volume of popular science books has expanded exponentially. Unfortunately, publishers have lowered their quality thresholds in order to get more books out of the door.All of which increases the satisfaction when you find one of the gems.Creation is a book in 2 parts - firstly Steve Grand demolishes your view of the universe, and then he explains how he created 'life' in the computer program Creatures.Without the early groundwork, the second part would be interesting but in a 'so what?' kind of way. But viewed as a whole, the Creatures program emerges as a very clever approach to artificial life.In passing the book also looks at other approaches to artificial life, but not in great detail, and as such this book is quite narrow in scope, but not annoyingly so.Creation makes you look at the world slightly differently and opens up a whole load of new possibilities, which is exactly what popular science books should do.

The first half of this book was a series of ideas and facts new to me, that blew my mind. Having settled down, I went on to read the second half, which describes how to put these ideas together. My life is better for having read this.

It bends the way you think about causality and emergence in the occurrence of living systems.

Steve Grand's book was mentioned in Brad Stone's bio of Jeff Bezos, 'the everything store', which lead me to buy it myself a decade after Bezos. It's a very interesting explanation of how persistent, self replicating forms emerge layer by layer, with the rules at each level having little direct relationship with the ones below. It means you can create a complex persistent robust system that works without actually working on the system. Instead you can work on the rules of the layer from which it emerges. Small changes in the layer below produce changes in the one above. Some will be big, dramatic changes. Others will be unnoticeable. It may be hard to work out which will do what. But once you tune it right, the emergent system can be stable and self sustaining. That's what intrigued Bezos in his design of Amazon in the early 2000's, and you can see why. It is leverage.

After reading through the entire book I have found no real takeaway in terms of usefull information! An interesting read but nothing more !!

I really enjoyed this book. The first part explains and justifies, to my mind completely convincingly, that artificial minds should be possible in a computer and sets out a philiosophy for creating them. It's very well thought out, but not at all stuffy - there's lots of humour and vitality. My main dissapointment, the reason I gave it 4 stars not 5, is that when he describes how the Creatures work, they don't fit his own philiosophy, and so cannot be considered intelligent or alive. Basically he applied a philiosophy that he already rejected earlier in the book. Maybe this was due to processing power constraints, I don't know. Overall though it's excellent and I hope other researchers follow up and build on the work.

Creation - Life and how to make it by Steve GrandIf God wrote a book about the way he put the universe together, why the laws of physics were the way they were, how he came to design humans and all the other life forms on Earth, and why they are interdependent with each other and with the planet it would be a lot like 'Creation - Life and how to make it' by Steve Grand. Steve is a self confessed digital god. And he can prove it: there are over a million lifeforms created by him running around in computers all over the world. They live in their own world of Albia within the computer game 'Creatures'. These are not your run-of-the-mill scripted non-player-characters common in computer games - these little creatures aren't programmed to behave - their behavior emerges from the way they are. They are artificial life or ALife.This is a lightly written mind-bendingly deep book. As light and refreshing as sparkling wine but with a kick like a mule. When you realize you have been smooth talked into abandoning the last fifty years of AI research and development along with the majority of current thinking on ALife you know the Grand philosophy has gotten into your blood.'Creation' isn't just about the inhabitants of a game, it's about what makes something exist at all and what it is to be alive and even more important to humans, what is intelligence? what is a conscious mind and can machines have them too? Steve's challenge to himself was to make life within a computer, not just low life but intelligent life. In this book he describes how to do it from first principles. It's not a book about exactly how to write the code instead it's about how to think about simulations and about living organisms so that there's some point to writing the code. Explaining how to think about the world, starting with understanding subatomic particles, atoms, then molecules, then autocatalytic networks, self-reproducing systems, adaptive systems, intelligence and mind is something Steve is very good at. Must come from all the thinking he does. He says that sitting in a darkened silent room and just thinking is one of his favorite occupations. It's left him with an almost Buddhist sense of detachment from reality as most people conceive of the world. For example his idea of a law of nature is: "Things that persist, persist. Things that don't, don't." Note the resemblence to Newton's: "A body in motion tends to stay in motion. A body at rest tends to stay at rest." After a few of Steve's thought experiments you find yourself coming round to his point of view.He's pushing for a paradigm shift in our view of reality and like the others before him: Copernicus, Gallileo, Newton, and Einstein, to name a few of these scientific revolutionaries, he's finding it hard work standing the world on its head. But as with his predecessors once the ground has moved under your feet the new place you're standing seems completely right and obvious. It's a new way of seeing that is vital to continued progress. If there has to be a god I wouldn't mind letting Steve have a go at the job - as long as he isn't answerable to another marketing department controlling what his creatures look like. Those cutesy Norns ugh!Sue Wilcox bio: Sue Wilcox writes about ALife virtual worlds and other other technologies that define the edges around and between lifeforms. She chaired the Biota ALife conference in San Jose in 1999. She has spoken about the future of Alife inside and outside the computer at international conferences for several years.

Long winded and takes time to get to the point.

Well written.Interesting views on physics, what life is and psychology.Workings of his programm well explained.Perhaps for unacquainted difficult to follow although written as an introduction.Perhaps a theoretical analysis of what his programm is doing is missing.Impressive performance to write the programm and describe it so well.

Very cool the insights and experiments presented by the author. It gives you a new perspective of how life can be defined.

I read this over the Christmas break having had it on my shelf for the last year. It's a great and inspiring read. Written by someone with actual practical experience creating sophisticated AI software and robots, the details mentioned in here really demonstrate depth of knowledge.It's highly readable though, requiring no technical knowledge, and one of those titles (like Dawkins' Selfish Gene) that makes the reader feel like a genius as the layers unfold. It focuses on the details of making a single individual as sophisticated as possible rather than the approach taken by most comparable researchers, who hook together 'creatures' driven by a few simple rules, apply those to a large population and let 'emergent' processes do the rest and generate complex outcomes. It's true - looking at ants in the real world, and various a-life programs created, you do indeed get interesting and unforeseen complexities from a large population of super simple organisms. But every increase in the sophistication of the individual creatures will have exponential benefits in how rich the outcomes will be from a population of them!Steve Grand is still at work developing a new version of his beloved creatures, called 'Grandroids'. This is a great insight into his thought processes and an exciting peek at what the next generation of intelligent artificial creatures may be like.

Great book, but it takes time to comrehend ideas written in it.Keep in mind, that it's not for developers, you won't find code snippets and examples on how to create neural network etc.It's more of a philosophy book - it shows how to change YOUR mindset in order to understand AI, neural networks and be able to work on them.Overall - remarkable lecture.

I must say I enjoyed the book completely. While I don't agree with the author on all points - the book is incredibly thought provoking. I was so glad to see such a book written that after I read the book (in 3 nights - short book) I bought three copies for co-workers who I wanted to read it. Steve Grand is now quite famous (or should I say even more famous) after writing this book. He has challenged traditional thought on the subject of AI and in a way that has made converts out of many.However, he spends 10 chapters saying "you are all wrong - this is the way to do it" - then doesn't follow up on doing it himself but rather takes enough shortcuts to make the work suspect - but to his credit he does say he's doing going just that :) All in all - if you're a software engineer or software developer I highly recommended the book.