Christopher Langton (1949- ) is an American computer scientist and one of the founders of the field of artificial life.^[1] He coined the term in the late 1980s^[2] 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. He has two adult sons: Gabe and Colin.

[edit] Publications

• Christopher G. Langton. "Computation at the edge of chaos". Physica D, 42, 1990.
• Christopher G. Langton. "Computation at the edge of Chaos: Phase-Transitions and Emergent Computation." Ph.D. Thesis, University of Michigan (1990).

About Langton's work

• J. P. Crutchfield and K. Young, "Computation at the Onset of Chaos", in Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information, W. Zurek, editor, SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, VIII, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts (1990) pp. 223-269.
• Stuart Kauffman. Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Oxford University Press, 1993.
• 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

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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

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