Creation: Life and How to Make It

The seemingly impossible-to-deliver promise made by its subtitle ("Life and How to Make It") is reason enough to read this book. And to a significant extent the author does indeed accomplish his task of giving you the recipe to create life. Steve Grand starts by shifting your mindset away from the traditional materialistic assumption that only material objects are real and everything else has an inferior level of existence. He succeeds (at least in my case) in convincing the reader that non-material phenomena are just as real as material objects. He goes further to tell you that you are not the matter that you are made of, but rather a persistent phenomenon in which matter flows in and out renewing every bit of your body throughout your life. And that, in this same way, if you are able to create a persistent phenomenon inside a virtual world (like a computer) whose behaviour is similar to that of living objects as we know them, then what you have produced is indeed artificial life. He will then tell you what are the essential building blocks of his artificial creatures and how they are interconnected. You don't get to see any meaningful computer code (of course) but you do get a very clear ontological picture of his creatures.If this was not enough, there is a hidden and perhaps even greater value to this book. Steve Grand does not have any post-graduate academic training and despite that he was able to lead the team that accomplished (to a certain extent) the gargantuan task that five decades of academic research has not been able to deliver. Steve Grand is a prime example that science can be made quite successfully outside the confines of the academic world. The fact that he was not tied to any academic circle enabled him to discard (and at times even mock at) most assumptions that prevail in the field of AI and pursue a path of his own that ultimately led his team to success.

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.

Steve Grand's introduction to artificial life for the non-scientist is nothing if not an interesting read. While he may go out on an intellectual limb from time to time, he does put forth a convincing, and somewhat radical, definition of what constitutes life. I was quite impressed with his approach to creating a synthetic life form. Rather than just attempting to animate a cartoon with a limited repertoire of behaviors, he practically starts at the sub-atomic level. From there he builds his creatures molecule by molecule, system by system until he has a credible model of what an artificial living being might be like. This guy is thorough! My only disappointment was that he expended this amount of well directed thought and work to create "creatures" that look like they were designed for a kids' Saturday morning cartoon. They could have been so much cooler...

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.

This book is fantastic. I wasn't really sure what to expect when I got it, but was pleasantly surprised. Before this I read 'Digital Biology' by Peter Bentley, and this book was much more interesting. No, they don't cover exactly the same subject matter, and Bentley's book covers a broader range of subjects, but if you're looking at both of them, I think this is a better intro to artificial life and digital biology.Grand is obviously a great programmer and scientist, and he's an excellent writer to boot. I've never played Creatures (in fact, I'd never even heard of it before reading this book) but now I really want to get my hands on a copy to try it out. I can hardly wait for his next book about his current project.

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.

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.

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.