My Research
10 November 2004
Artificial Life means many things to many people. As yet, I am still finding my footing in this young but incredibly diverse field of research. Under the supervision of Dr. Barry McMullin, School of Electronic Engineering, DCU, and Dr. Darragh O'Brien, School of Computing, DCU, along with generous funding provided by both Schools as well as the EU funded Programmable Artificial Cell Evolution (PACE) project, I am pursuing a PhD in the field of Artificial Life.
As for the direction of my research, it's kind of difficult to call at this early stage. In their paper entitled "Open Problems in Artificial Life", published in the proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Artificial Life, Bedau et al. listed 14 "Open Problems" in the area, much in the style of similar lists presented by mathmaticians to their respective fields. I am presently most interested in the second problem, that of achieving the transition to life in an artificial chemistry in silico. I will examine prior work on this topic, for example Tom Ray's Tierra, and explore the possibility of further work on such systems in an attempt to address the above open problem.