Artificial life is necessarily engineered life, to some degree. Hence an engineering perspective can be used to define requirements, design, and implementation constraints in the quest to develop ALife organisms and systems. Here we identify autopoiesis, agency, and open-ended adaptation as the key high level requirements for ALife, and discuss some possible design and implementation consequences.
summary booklet (6MB pdf)
@inproceedings{Stepney:2026-ALife-summ,
author = "Susan Stepney",
title = "An Engineering Definition of (Artificial) Life",
pages = 4-6,
crossref = "ALife-2026-summ"
}
@proceedings{ALife-2026-summ,
title = "ALife 2026 Summaries",
booktitle = "ALife 2026 Summaries",
editor = "Nehaniv, Chrystopher L and Lewis, Peter R and Nichele, Stefano
and Čejková, Jitka and Salge, Christoph and Khan, Imran and
Derets, Hanna",
url = "https://github.com/emerging-researchers-alife/conference_proceedings/raw/refs/heads/main/ALIFE2026Summaries.pdf",
year = 2026
}