Christopher Langton

Christopher Langton (1949- ) is an American biologist and one of the founders of the field of artificial life. He coined the term in the late 1980s when he organized 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 simple artificial life simulations, in addition to his Lambda parameter, a dimensionless measure of complexity and computation potential in cellular automata, given by a chosen state divided by all the possible states. For a 2-state, 1-r neighborhood, 1D cellular automata the value is close to 0.5. For a 2-state, Moore neighborhood, 2D cellular automata, like Conway's Life, the value is 0.273.

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

References

Some further reading: (some 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.
• C. G. Langton. "Computation at the edge of Chaos: Phase-Transitions and Emergent Computation." Ph.D. Thesis, University of Michigan (1990).
• 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. Dynamics, Computation, and the "Edge of Chaos": A Re-Examination
• Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution by Stuart Kauffman

External links

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

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