Without other examples, it is difficult to distinguish essential properties of life - properties that would be shared by any living system - from properties that may be incidental to life in principle, but which happen to be universal to life on Earth due solely to a combination of local historical accident and common genetic descent.

In order to derive general theories about life, we need an ensemble of instances to generalize over. Since it is quite unlikely that alien lifeforms will present themselves to us for study in the near future, our only option is to try to create alternative life-forms ourselves - Artificial Life - literally ``life made by Man rather than by Nature.''

Artificial Life (``AL'' or ``Alife'') is the name given to a new discipline that studies "natural" life by attempting to recreate biological phenomena from scratch within computers and other "artificial" media. Alife complements the traditional analytic approach of traditional biology with a synthetic approach in which, rather than studying biological phenomena by taking apart living organisms to see how they work, one attempts to put together systems that behave like living organisms.

The process of synthesis has been an extremely important tool in many disciplines. Synthetic chemistry - the ability to put together new chemical compounds not found in nature - has not only contributed enormously to our theoretical understanding of chemical phenomena, but has also allowed us to fabricate new materials and chemicals that are of great practical use for industry and technology.

Artificial life amounts to the practice of ``synthetic biology'' and, by analogy with synthetic chemistry, the attempt to recreate biological phenomena in alternative media will result in not only better theoretical understanding of the phenomena under study, but also in practical applications of biological principles in the technology of computer hardware and software, mobile robots, spacecraft, medicine, nanotechnology, industrial fabrication and assembly, and other vital engineering projects.

By extending the horizons of empirical research in biology beyond the territory currently circumscribed by life-as-we-know-it, the study of Artificial Life gives us access to the domain of life-as-it-could-be, and it is within this vastly larger domain that we must ground general theories of biology and in which we will discover practical and useful applications of biology in our engineering endeavors.

Although all of the current resources have been created by carbon-based life forms, there is nothing in its charter that restricts Zooland to include resources created by non-carbon-based life forms; it is simply that this is the only kind of life form that has, as of yet, been unable to send in URLs to their objects of study. [Oh boy; I guess we'd better delete this paragraph. -Ed.]

By extending the horizons of emperical research in Alife beyond the territory currently circumscribed by the zoo-as-we-know-it methaphora, the study of Artificial Life in the context of Zooland, gives us access to the notion of zoo-as-it-could-be, and it is within this mindblowingly larger domain that we must ground general repositories of Alife resources and in which we will discover yet another practical and useful application of internetworked hypermedia engineering endeavors. [Jeez... what the hell are you trying to say? -Ed.]

In Summary, [Good! -Ed.] Zooland is a HTML/World-Wide Web frontend to the Alife collection on UUNET Deutschland's FTP server; Alife Online at The Santa Fe Institute plus some other tremendously fascinating places on the 'net; accessible via the unique interface to the default sites below. [Ah, a zoo-as-it-should-be! -Ed.]. Enjoy!

Zooland USA:

http://alife.santafe.edu/~joke/zooland/ (SFI)

Zooland Europe:

http://surf.de.uu.net/zooland/

Zooland version 6.286 for free download:

http://surf.de.uu.net/zooland/download/zooland/

The idea of playing god on computers took off 30 years ago, when mathematician John Conway invented the Game of Life, in which colored cells in a grid vie for survival. By now, applications of artificial life (Alife) are becoming commonplace: Social scientists use "evolutionary" algorithms to explore social interactions, for example, while biologists harness the equations for studying protein folding and lining up DNA sequences.

Try your hand at the creation and destruction of life at Zooland, a site where animals mate and compete, armies battle, landscapes bloom, and whimsical creatures learn to walk or swim. The site is targeted "somewhere between newbie/layman and die-hard expert," says Zooland mastermind Jörg Heitkötter, head of research at the Internet provider UUNET's subsidiary in Germany. After boning up on the subject with The Hitchhiker's Guide to Evolutionary Computation, co-authored by Heitkötter, you'll be ready to jump to Alife software programs for Macs, PCs, and UNIX. For instance, The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma looks at trade-offs between cooperation and defection; in Sugarscape, civilizations evolve as tribes trade and bicker over stores of sugar (Science, 1 November 1996, p. 727); and in yet another game, lions stalk gazelles on a virtual savanna.

Zooland is also referenced in Edward J. Renehan, Jr., SCIENCE ON THE WEB - A Connoisseur's Guide To Over 500 Of The Best, Most Useful, And Most Fun Science Websites, Springer Science, New York, NY, 1996.

Please, send your additions, comments, and complaints on dangling pointers to the Zookeeper joke@de.uu.net. And don't take anything in this service too seriously; it's only science.

Thanks to C. Titus Brown for the Alife FAQ; Howard Gutowitz for the opportunity to work with him on the CA FAQ; (and the opportunity to give an "evening lecture on assigning octal numbers to files on unixoid file systems" ;-) ; Chris Langton for keeping me alive at Alife Online; Nelson Minar for patiently handling my requests; Hendrik Tiemann for our joint paper; and everybody else I forgot to mention! (Apologies to Chris Langton & Douglas Adams for combining parts of their intellectual output with mine...) More thanx are here.

1. A Collection of Hyperlinks:
2. A research paper:
3. An MPEG movie:
4. A Hyperlink to an anonymous FTP Server:
5. A Mirror Site:
6. A Really Hot Site:
7. This program needs one of the following operating systems:
   

   Atari ST: PC DOS/Windows: Macintosh: Unix:

8. You need a Java-capable browser to view pages marked: