Computer scientist Christopher Langton was 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.

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, noted author of numerous books including the "Homer Kelly Mysteries".

References

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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

External links

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• Explanation of Langton's Lambda
• The Swarm development group

Computer scientists

Christopher Langton