Christopher Langton

Christopher Langton
Chris Langton at SFI, 1989
Born1948/1949
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Michigan
Known forArtificial life research
Langton's loops
Langton's ant

Christopher Gale Langton (born 1948/49) 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 "Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" (otherwise known as Artificial Life I) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987.[3] Following his time at Los Alamos, Langton joined the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), to continue his research on artificial life. He left SFI in the late 1990s, and abandoned his work on artificial life, publishing no research since that time.

He was profiled extensively in chapters 6 and 8 of the book Complexity (1993), by M. Mitchell Waldrop.[4]

  1. ^ Christopher G Langton (1998). Artificial life: an overview. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-62112-6.
  2. ^ Mohan Matthen et al. (2007). Philosophy of biology. Elsevier, 2007. ISBN 0-444-51543-7. p. 585.
  3. ^ Christopher G. Langton, ed. (1989). Artificial Life: The proceedings of an interdisciplinary workshop on the synthesis and simulation of living systems, held September, 1987, in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Santa Fe Institute studies in the sciences of complexity. Vol. 6. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-09346-4.
  4. ^ Waldrop, M.Mitchell (1993). Complexity - The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-87234-6.