The CD-ROM Artificial Life is essential for anyone working in Artificial Life, Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science and related fields. Based on the Artificial Intelligence and Darwinism Symposium held at Tufts University in March 1995, this disc incorporates video, audio, commentary text, and biographies and serves as a unique record of this extraordinary event.
Conceived by Professor Daniel Dennett, the Tufts Symposium set out to explore the relationship between Darwinism and Artificial Intelligence: how the study of the way in which biological brains and autonomous agents arose in the past might inform our efforts to build artificial brains and autonomous agents in the future.


To debate the issues, Dennett brought together many of the key contributors to the fields of Artificial Life, Artificial Intelligence, Biology, and Cognitive Science over the last thirty years. The fascinating and lively debate that ensued ranges far and wide, from Philosophy of Science to Mathematical Genetics taking in historical issues and ethical considerations for the future along the way.




  • 900 speech items

  • 33 minutes of video

  • 96 minutes of audio

  • 300 bibliographies

  • 150 glossary entries

  • 200 search terms






The CD-ROM includes biographies and videos of:
Pattie Maes Murray Gell-Mann Marvin Minsky
Oliver Selfridge John Holland Hans Moravec
Karl Sims Rodney Brooks Sherry Turkle
Kevin Kelly Daniel Dennett David Haig
Bruce Mazlish Seymour Papert




The symposium has been divided into 26 themes following the structure of the two day symposium. These themes are:
  • Sims's work Evolutionary timescales
  • Beauty and anthropomorphism
  • The role of recombination
  • Genotypes, phenotypes, and Tierra
  • COG
  • Turing test
  • Emergence
  • Brooks vs Minsky on vision
  • Minsky and learning
  • Behaviour and intentionality
  • Complexity, entropy, and the search for
    • extra-terrestrial intelligence
  • The future of work
  • Hill-climbing and genetic algorithms
  • Ethics and science
  • Man as machine
  • Evolutionary open-endedness
  • Attitudes to Penrose
  • Teleology
  • Pattie Maes’ agents
  • Information regulation
  • A historian’s view of the future
  • CYC
  • Levels of Explanation
  • On prediction
  • Lessons

    • Each theme consists of the transcripted text with video and audio clips highlighting the most important issues within that theme. Commentary texts linked to the transcripts consist of brief explanations of important ideas or concepts. The 150 word glossary gives more detailed explanations of the keywords and can be accessed directly from the speech transcripts or browsed for general interest. You can also search the transcripted text using a pre-defined list of search terms to find the article desired.

    A biography of each speaker is provided with details of all their academic positions, works, theories, major publications, and awards and around 300 bibliographic references can be scrolled through as a complete list to give pointers to relevant reading material.

    Artificial Life is the only CD-ROM to give you access to the key issues discussed at the Tufts Symposium. Watch, listen, and understand as world-renowned experts expand their theories, debate important ideas, and explain the most fascinating concepts in this area of study.

    To order your copy of Artificial Life click here