Artificial life: Random walk

Chapter 1

*Introduction*

# Preface #

This book is about artificial life phenomenon. A single point is used to represent and to simulate an alive individual virtual animal. The point moves and traces its movements on the computer screen. We have grid of cells (pixels on the monitor) which are visited by the point. The observer recognizes such behavior as sort of life. Different kinds of such processes are presented and illustrated in the series Artificial Life of three books: random walk (Book I – this volume), virtual ant (Book II) and virtual kret (Book III). The programs in Java to perform such experiments are included. The following general characteristics can be used to categorize these processes: using or not memory, walking in non-restricted directions, and walking along a predefined path. Thus we consider and present different combination of the following rules and processes.

Random walk (Book I) – in this case the virtual animal does not use memory (the point doesn’t remember its previous steps) and is allowed to choose (randomly) any new location. The point is free to go in each directions – no any restriction on the move direction. We may put some restrictions on directions and add some memory. This new futures changes drastically behaviour of our virtual animal.

A virtual ant