The Garden in the Machine, Chapter One, by ClaussEmmeche, Princeton University Press (1994)T H E G A M E O F L I F E"IN FACT, it's quite easy to create life."The little man with the dark eyes smiles. He has justsummarized his lecture. A weak buzz from hiscomputer confirms his conclusion. We can create life -and not only by reproducing our own flesh and blood;rather, we can create completely new life. The man isThomas Ray from the University of Delaware. Hedoes not have any supernatural or religious capacity.As a trained ecologist, Ray knows his biology and hasa rather unsentimental, down-to-earth relation toliving things. The kind of life Ray is talking aboutcreating is biological life, but of a very special kind.We are at the Technical University of Denmark,just outside Copenhagen, where Ray is visiting aresearch group that studies chaos theory and artificiallife. A few years ago, Ray had renounced the study oftropical ecosystems, which had been his specialty.Ray was not bored, nor had he cynically realized thathis object of study was soon going to disappear andthat he had to find a new niche in the academicworld. No, no matter how much Ray loved his rainforests, there was something else that had attractedhis attention. He had gotten a remarkable idea: thatwith the help of computers he could piece togetherfragments of computer programs (i.e., instructions)and turn them into artificial organisms that did notjust resemble life, but that theoretically speakingwere just as alive as real animals and plants.The idea seems a bit insane, or rather grandiose.Today, however, Ray can conclude that it is in fact"quite easy" to repro duce life. Just t hink of theco mputer vir uses that plague our computer systems.The viruses are often created by hackers, usuallyteenagers with an intimate knowledge of their own andothers' computers. They hack themselvesinto company orgovernment computer networks and then releasetheir homemade computer programs or viruses intothese giant systems. These virulent pieces of computerprogramming reproduce themselves and then spreadto all the computers in the network. Here they oftenmake complete chaos of the most sophisticatedsystems and erase important data .2 Viruses are, in thissense, a form of life.Ray was not the first to arrive at the idea of computerlife. In 1989, when he began to work on creatingorganisms, scientists from many different disciplineswere already testing the idea of creating life inartificial universes. A common thread began toemerge between them. This new life would be morefun, and it would be a more creative life than thedestructive computer viruses that had wreakedhavoc on several scientific centers. The project itself wasto be interdisciplinary and scientifically ambitious, inthe same way as in the 1950s when logicians,computer scientists, and psychologists cametogether in the attempt to construct "artificialintelligence."A modest man, Ray entitled his project "AnApproach to the Synthesis of Life," implying thatthere exist other possible methods as well. Life is aprocess, a complex, rhythmic pattern of matter andenergy. What is important is not what kind of matteror what kind of energy we find, but rather thepattern, the process, the form. The computer's powers ofinformation processing can imitate other formsand processing so well that the result is not simplyan imitation or a theoretical image of life. Thepulsating patterns on the computer screen arethemselves new examples of how the process of lifeitself can take form, says Ray. Such self-developingpatterns of processes are life.There are an infinite number of processes in nature andin society where minute changes have profound,wide-ranging effects. If one removes the lowest can ina supermarket's tower of canned tuna fish, a largenumber of events occur quickly, one after the other;not only do the cans fall, but the tower itself vanishes.Physically speaking, it is easy enough to understandthat a tower of canned tuna, which represe nts anorganized system in an unstable balance, ma yquickly evolve into a more stable state: a pile of canson the floor. This happens when the small change thattakes place at the bottom of the tower ruptures thefragile symmetry and thereby converts the cans'potential energy into movement, heat, and aconsiderable amo unt o f disorder. The cans comealive nearly all by themselves. But the cans'development in a supermarket does not have much todo with life in a biological sense. When we say that lifeis self-organizing, we refer to that which typifies aliving organism (and the species' evolution), theorganization that is built up and maintained rather thandestroyed. Order does not disappear like the towerof cans in the supermarket; something is broken downalong the way, to be sure, but order is continuallyrecreated. Ray discovered that he did not need to do muchhimself b e f o r e a l l k i n d s o f t h i n g s b e g a n t os h o w u p o n h i s computer. The events on the screenwere more reminiscent of life's self-organization1than of the spontaneous fall of a to we r of can s .W hen R a y desi gne d j ust o ne s i mp l e stem-organism, in the form of a program that he set off inhis computer, it evolved into a veritable zoo ofvarious species of descendants. Some wereparasites (programs that utilize the computationalresources of other programs). Others werehyperparasites (which exploited the parasites); andthere also emerged more social organisms. Allthese organisms evolved