Christopher Langton

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Computer scientist Christopher Langton is one of the founders of the field of artificial life. He coined the term in the late 1980s when he held the first "International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" (otherwise known as Artificial Life I) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987.

A graduate of the University of Michigan, Langton created the Langton ant and Langton loop, both landmark simple artificial life simulations, in addition to his Lambda measure, a dimensionless measure of complexity in an evolutionary system: most interesting systems tend to converge on a particular lambda value.

Langton is the first-born son of Jane Langton,author of books including the Homer Kelly Mysteries.

[edit] References

Some further reading: (references borrowed from Edge of chaos)

Christopher G. Langton. "Computation at the edge of chaos". Physica D, 42, 1990.
J. P. Crutchfield and K. Young, "Computation at the Onset of Chaos", in Entropy, Complexity, and the Physics of Information, W. Zurek, editor, SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, VIII, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts (1990) pp. 223-269.
Melanie Mitchell, Peter T. Hraber, and James P. Crutchfield. Revisiting the edge of chaos: Evolving cellular automata to perform computations. Complex Systems, 7:89--130, 1993.
Melanie Mitchell, James P. Crutchfield and Peter T. Hraber. Dynamics, Computation, and the "Edge of Chaos": A Re-Examination
Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution by Stuart Kauffman