Artifical Life also known as alife or a-life, is the study of life through the use of human-made analogs of living systems. Computer scientist Christopher Langton coined the term in the late 1980s when he held 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.

The focus of this seminar is Artificial Life in software. Topics which will be covered include: what Artificial Life (ALife) is and is about;

open research problems in Alife;

presuppositions underlying Alife in software;

basic requirements of an Alife software system and some guidelines for designing Alife in software. A few Alife software systems will also be introduced to help concretize the concepts