At This 4-H Show, Computers Will Hog All the Attention

Be careful: The blue-ribbon winner in this 4-H contest bytes.

Opening Monday is the Second Artificial Life 4-H Show, featured attraction of the Artificial Life II Workshop in Santa Fe, N.M. While artificial intelligence uses computers to model the mind, artificial life practitioners use computers as a medium for evolution, ecosystems and self-reproducing automata.

More than 400 biologists, physicists, anthropologists and computer scientists are expected to attend and discuss the latest approaches to transforming software and silicon into life-emulating creatures.

“Artificial life is the new metaphor for machinery,” says Esther Dyson, a noted computer science critic. “In the last century, people built things; this century, people are going to grow them.”

To add the spice of competition to the conference, the organizers sponsored their own 4-H contest in 1987 to let the participants show off their artificial life forms. “It was a way to have fun and reward people who did interesting things,” says Chris Langton, a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratories’ complex systems group and a 4-H judge. “Our criteria were for things that were the most lifelike--we won’t say alive yet.”

“Best of Show” at the first Artificial Life conference in 1987 went to a team that developed a program that grew “branching structures.” These structures evolved in forms uncannily similar to real life plants.

Second place went to a computer scientist who developed software “boids”--bird-like computer creatures that emulated flocking and schooling behaviors.

The possible front-runner in this year’s contest--expected to have more than 50 entries--is “Rod Brooks’ Lab at MIT,” says Langton, “if they bring along some of their critters.” The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Microbots” are a hot topic in the growing artificial life community.

The real 4-H Council--the one that sponsors thousands of county fair contests each year--doesn’t quite know what to make of this. “Are you serious?” asks 4-H spokeswoman Denise Miller. “I’m having difficulty visualizing this.”