Christopher Langton

when I was in high school and college, one of the things that I was really influenced by was the early artificial life works coming out of the Santa Fe Institute.

And what they were exploring, people like Chris Langton, was the idea that maybe some of the things that we associate with life, self-replication, evolution, are principles of computer programs, things that computer programs can do.

And so we can simulate them on a computer and we can watch an artificial evolutionary process proceed.

And the sort of first point there is that once you have a programming language, let's say assembly language, then writing a program that copies itself is dead easy.