Kevin Courtneyon Alife

Alife? No thanks, I've already got one.

No, not a life - Alife. And there are a lot of people competing to get one of those.

Why would anyone want to get something that sounds like Alfie misspelt?

Alife stands for artificial life - it's the catch-all term to describe artificial life, and the study of it, in all its shapes and forms. Artificial life is anything that displays the properties of a living organism, but is actually created in the laboratory.

We've already got that - her name's Britney Spears.

You may not believe this, but the world is tantalisingly close to the biggest breakthrough in Alife, the creation of a competely synthesised living cell. If this happens, the study of artificial life will have moved from the theoretical to the actual, and pretty soon we may be having a pint with a replicant.

But surely Alife isn't that hard? All you have to do is make something imitate you and me.

Ever since Robby the Robot appeared on the science fiction classic, Forbidden Planet, the world has been obsessed with artificial beings. We've had Data, from Star Trek, an android who spent a lot of time pondering his androidness. We've had K9, Dr Who's clunky robot who thought he was a dog. And we've had the replicants in Blade Runner, who were so physiologically similar to humans that even viewers were confused as to who was human and who was non-human.

That's all fine for the TV and the movies, but what about the real world?

We're not quite up to the level of replicants on Blade Runneryet. In fact, we're not even at K9 level. It's not easy to create an entirely synthetic being. Oh, it's a doddle to knock up some software that behaves like a living object on the computer screen, or to cobble together a mechanical wotsit that imitates a living thing. But to create something alive, with its own self-sustaining metabolic system, that can reproduce itself as part of a built-in evolutionary system . . . well, that's gonna take a while, buddy, and it's going to cost you. Don't expect it by Friday anyway.

So who are these people trying to create artificial life?

There is a whole community of Alife aficionados out there, who eagerly exchange findings in the field of Alife, and get very excited when someone, say, injects a manufactured chromosome into a living cell.

Whoop-de-do! But can this cell buy me a drink?

The International Society of Artificial Life is the leading group driving the research into Alife. It recently held its 11th annual conference in Winchester, England, where everyone got very animated. "This is a critical time for artificial life," enthused one particularly excited person, claiming that we were on the verge of synthesising a living cell.

Sounds like these people need to get a life.

The Artificial Life XI conference discussed many aspects of this most esoteric field and numerous papers were presented to the conference, dealing with such matters as "adaptive spam detection inspired by the immune system", "uncertainty and communication complexity in iterated co-operation games" and "theoretic aspects of control in a bio-hybrid robot device".

I think I've just lost the will to live.

Okay, at the end of the conference, we may not be any closer to creating a fully self-sustaining artificial organism, but that's no reason not to keep trying. The society's members are determined to keep plugging away at creating artificial life, even if it kills them.

But what use would anyone have for artificial life?

You'd be surprised. The theories propounded by Alife evangelists have been applied to everything from the Mars lander to cinema special effects. Alife has also been applied in the financial world, where biological-type algorithms have been used to crunch numbers (which figures - it certainly looks like the wealth was artificial all along).

Try at work:"Wilkins, great work on making an artificial dog, but did you have to make it smell so real?"

Try at home:"But darling, the blow-up doll is purely for research into artificial life."