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Creation: Life and How to Make It

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Working mostly alone, almost single-handedly writing 250,000 lines of computer code, Steve Grand produced Creatures ®, a revolutionary computer game that allowed players to create living beings complete with brains, genes, and hormonal systems―creatures that would live and breathe and breed in real time on an ordinary desktop computer. Enormously successful, the game inevitably raises the What is artificial life? And in this book―a chance for the devoted fan and the simply curious onlooker to see the world from the perspective of an original philosopher-engineer and intellectual maverick―Steve Grand proposes an answer.

From the composition of the brains and bodies of artificial life forms to the philosophical guidelines and computational frameworks that define them, Creation plumbs the practical, social, and ethical aspects and implications of the state of the art. But more than that, the book gives readers access to the insights Grand acquired in writing Creatures ―insights that yield a view of the world that is surprisingly antireductionist, antimaterialist, and (to a degree) antimechanistic, a view that sees matter, life, mind, and society as simply different levels of the same thing. Such a hierarchy, Grand suggests, can be mirrored by an equivalent one that exists inside a parallel universe called cyberspace.

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

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Steve Grand

6 books23 followers

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5 stars
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
Profile Image for Liv.
90 reviews11 followers
December 25, 2008
(Editorial note: When doing a bit of googling research on Mr. Grand for this review, it came to my attention that he lists his occupation as "Digital God" on his Cyberlife Research Profile page. While this hubris is initially prickly, it's, well, it's not far off kids.)

Back in the day when I was a young sprout, instead of a green branch, I found a game called Creatures which was OMG available for the mac. My sister and I scrimped and saved, and together with a donation from my mother (in money as well as computer timespace) we got to play it. It was groundbreaking, in ways I was too young to understand, though as I grew up with the game a bit, I came to be more and more dazzled by it. Drawn into it.

Creatures is an Artificial Life game. There's a world, Albia, 2 dimensional, with plants both dangerous and helpful, buildings, toys, underground tunnels, learning machines, and of course, creatures. Fuzzy lil' rabbit/squirrel/primate looking things are norns, the main species of the game. Can they be called a species? Oh wow, the implications! Grendels, big scaly green guys are the other species, though they are much rarer. Only one exists in the world at any time. New species were introduced in later versions, but, I'm only familiar with the first. And it's impressive enough.

Norns can be male or female. They age, eat, they get sick, they can breed, they "learn a language" (not true learning) but actually learn how to behave through positive and negative reinforcement (tickling and spanking, XD), and concept, and verb neurons in an artificial neural network. But really cool thing? They have genes coding for all this stuff (as well as mundane things like physical appearance). Ones and zeros like so many nucleotides coding for behaviours, immune systems, aging rates, and, if you're charitable, intelligence. These genes get passed onto their offspring. Just to make it even more fun, the genes can mutate. Just to make it even more cool, you can open up the digital DNA of a norn, and edit it. My 12 year old self was opening up hexadecimal files, to create norns that would be effectively immortal (remove aging sequence here!) or really dark blue (paste in 000080 there) or super-fertile, though I don't think I ever neutered one. I was a pre-pubescent genetic engineer.

Another electronic community rose up around the one of Norns and Grendels. The users. People playing around on the computer were suddenly inspired to be hackers, graphic artists, breeders, and world-creators. Each Creature is exported to a file which can then be traded. People started doing interesting things.
Genetically engineer norns to avoid incest. Make zombie norns with a constant "life force" of 0% but still be quite alive. Breed for backwards walking norns. Create masochistic norns, who would feel rewarded when spanked, and punished when tickled.
"Wolfling runs" were popular. Start a new world, throw a mish-mash of norns in and leave it without human interference for an epoch or three. See what evolves.

Steve Grand was the lead programmer of Creatures, and the latter half of Creation is a generalized description of how he did it. The first half of the book is an introduction to the concepts he considered and used in doing it. Interestingly, he did not take a reductionistic approach to creating artificial life. Instead he worked from the bottom up, creating simulations of smaller structures, then throwing them together. They worked almost "like magic" because the higher-level processes he was trying to simulate were emergent phenomena. He does a decent job of outlining his use of such topics as

* emergent phenomena
* consciousness as such
* feedback systems
* ways of playing with information: transducers, differentiators, integrators, etc. in biology (or simulations of biology)

His explanations are nice, in that they build in complexity. Starting off easy enough for the layman to understand, and become more and more layered. He makes ample use of easy to understand analogies but do to the pop-nature of the book, he doesn't have much room to expand upon the implications of the subjects he touches on. But it is enough to intrigue.

The second fraction of the book is a more concrete description of the step-by-step processes involved in actually creating the creatures for the game. There is not much in the way of hard how to computer programming instructions, though I expect that if one were a good programmer, the general description would be easily converted to code behind their purple pupils, and for the non-techno-whiz, it's accessible. We just get to understand that the mysterious code monkeys will somehow translate. We suspect magic, or perhaps cocaine, but they'll do it and make it show up on our screens, god love 'em.

This combined with peeking over the shoulder of a programmer, having a small amount of knowledge myself, and the obvious occupational benefits has convinced me that I really must learn to seriously program.

One stylistic note: Steve Grand apparently lives in some beautiful section of England. This is great, and all Steve-o, but starting every third paragraph with describing what you see out your front door, and then turning it into an analogy or example is not a fantastic writing device. The seventh time.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
4 reviews
April 15, 2016
Started of interesting and philosophical.

In particular, I got captivated by the discussion of cellular automata, persistence and emergent behavior.

As the book went on, it lost its edge.
Profile Image for James.
17 reviews
April 16, 2023
Interesting as a relic of previous thoughts an AI, on crafting brilliant artificial life with limited 1996 computing power (though this is a devastatingly small portion of the book), and loads on his philosophy behind creating life. Which despite his apparent love for nature, emergence and the human brain; I find rather tiresome. Nevertheless an interesting insight into Grand's devotion to artificial life.
Profile Image for Simón.
76 reviews29 followers
November 13, 2021
Simply Outstanding! Life, death, AI and everything in between... A deep view into our universe (or multiverse?) and how all "créatures" things got create... (or at least the second time)...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Bricoleur  (David) Soul.
22 reviews59 followers
December 30, 2007
Witty and provocative this is a great guide for a general audience - a kind of 'Zen Guide' to artificial life that is based not on the debunking or debasing of life but rather in its elevation to its proper place.

Grand is perhaps most widely known as the creator of "Creatures" the first computer game (circa 1997) based on the concept of artificial life but he is also a researcher in the field. In this book he lightly touches on the game but mainly he gives us a great tour of the main concepts of artificial life as he romps through a variety of prerequisite subjects from an introduction of cybernetics (the science of communication and control) through ideas about emergence and the necessity of balance in nature.

Along the way he evokes our thinking about concepts that are often unexplored or even taken for granted by many of us -- such factors as matter, mind, free will, and the nature of persistent systems are all areas where the reader can gain new insights which in turn lead to questions about how we define life and what it might mean to create artificial life that is intelligent.

As with all good books, this one leaves us with broader horizons and more exciting questions and unknowns than we had before we encountered it. Its well worth the read!

As for myself, I simply have to find out the directions and findings of the author's research since he wrote this book so I've put Grand's more recent book, Growing Up With Lucy: How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps , on my wish list and will likely end up special ordering it rather than just hoping it shows up in my favorite haunts....
Profile Image for Mike Lisanke.
519 reviews15 followers
April 14, 2023
I was going to give this author a pass on holding so many bad ideas because the book is now dated But I really can't recommend a book about Creating Life (and possibly consciousness) by simple Imitation of Life (or consciousness) with finite automata Or even neural nets as described by this author. A game developer simply lacks the ability to even realize the complexity of The Hard Problem. So, it's no surprise that the audience of AI researchers had a dull response to the author Or that the author's project Lucy, an AI Orangutan didn't make any headlines Or that the author was eventually asking for financial support on his blog.

I continue to explore the literature and research on GAI, consciousness and The Hard Problem (imitation != intelligence). The Turing Test may have been how machine IQ was defined in the 20th century But it doesn't come close to answering what self-aware conscious being are doing.
Profile Image for Justin Cramer.
78 reviews1 follower
December 5, 2018
Though this nearly 20-year-old book is walking through 25-year-old thoughts about artificial life and, to a small extent, artificial intelligence it is a fascinating read for someone not in that field. If you have even a basic understanding of computer programming this book should be easy to understand from the technical side.

This is the kind of book I will reread every year to two as I expect to receive more insight with every pass.
Profile Image for Tayo Olajide.
Author 2 books5 followers
June 12, 2020
Even though this is a tough read, it did present a lot of information on what ingredients are necessary to create "lives." Lives in this context mean products, services, or processes starting from the minutest element up to the whole and giving it essential properties that make it edifying, appropriate, and useful for its purpose. For those that design and engineer products, this book will be an invaluable addition to your repertoire.
3 reviews
October 28, 2020
Enjoyable read. Grand is funny and interesting. The philosophical and scientific depth to which he goes to build the foundations of his creatures are impressive. My one disappointment, as someone who dabbles in programming, was the lack of details concerning the implementation of his ideas in computer code.
Profile Image for Carter.
597 reviews
July 2, 2022
An odd book. There is little here about artificial life, or games. Just a series of disconnected fragments, indicating perhaps, a person distracted, or lost. The effect of course may be an illusion, but it wasn't what I was anticipating, and perhaps of limited value.
Profile Image for Salo Serfati.
9 reviews1 follower
May 13, 2022
Fun read!! If you want a book that you have to ponder over and think about the world's makeup, I highly recommend it. Digestible and insightful.
Profile Image for Jlawrence.
305 reviews160 followers
August 1, 2007
The author, who created the PC game Creatures, offers an intriguing view on what constitutues life and how one can simulate artificial entities in software. He concentrates on 'bottom-up' and 'emergent' design -- creating simple but dynamic systems from which more complicated and unplanned-for behavior can emerge -- as opposed to a 'top-down' approach that attempts to pre-program such behavior.

I cannot agree with some of the philosophical jumps he makes (I say his method creates models that simulate life where he would argue that once his models reach a certain level, they can be considered to be actually alive), and in some areas wish he had gone into deeper detail (the book is written for a general audience), but it's still a fascinating read.
Profile Image for Tris.
6 reviews1 follower
May 13, 2014
First and foremost this was an interesting and insightful read and lived up to my expectations.

It did disappoint me a little towards the end of the middle third of the book, when Steve decided to skip some of the detail and started to write in much more general way about some of the topics.

On a more personal level Steve touched on a number of topics that are very dear to my heart with this book, especially in his summary at the end and for that I would like to say thanks.
Profile Image for Donald.
48 reviews1 follower
November 3, 2018
An excellent and well thought out thesis, well ahead of its time. One can tell that this book encapsulates a man's life work as each detail is meticulously thought out and explained. I highly recommend this book to anyone, though it is slightly hard to get a hand on a copy.
Profile Image for Mike Benner.
25 reviews3 followers
August 23, 2013
Great book on an unique way to create artificial life in a computer environment.
Profile Image for Robert Wilson.
14 reviews1 follower
August 8, 2015
Outstanding. One of the most insightful books you'll find on the relationship between human thought and artificial intelligence. A fantastic work that will teach you new things page after page.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews

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