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Christopher Gale Langton (born 1948/49) is an American computer scientist and one of the founders of the field of
artificial life. He coined the term in the late 1980s 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
Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...
in 1987. 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.
Langton is the first-born son of
Jane Langton, author of books including the ''Homer Kelly Mysteries''. He has two adult sons: Gabe and Colin.
Artificial life
Langton made numerous contributions to the field of artificial life, both in terms of simulation and computational models of given problems and to philosophical issues. He early identified the problems of information, computation and reproduction as intrinsically connected with complexity and its basic laws. Inspired by ideas coming from physics, particularly phase transitions, he developed several key concepts and quantitative measures for
cellular automata and suggested that critical points separating order from disorder could play a very important role in shaping complex systems, particularly in biology. These ideas were also explored simultaneously, albeit with different approximations, by
James P. Crutchfield
James P. Crutchfield (born 1955) is an American mathematician and physicist. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in physics and mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1979 and his Ph.D. in physics there in 1983. He is curren ...
and
Per Bak
Per Bak (8 December 1948 – 16 October 2002) was a Danish theoretical physicist who coauthored the 1987 academic paper that coined the term "self-organized criticality."
Life and work
After receiving his Ph.D. from the Technical University of ...
among others.
While a graduate student at the
University of Michigan
, mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth"
, former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821)
, budget = $10.3 billion (2021)
, endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
, Langton created the
Langton ant and
Langton loop, both simple artificial life simulations, in addition to his lambda parameter, a dimensionless measure of complexity and computation potential in
cellular automata, given by a chosen state divided by all the possible states. For a 2-state, 1-r neighborhood, 1D cellular automata the value is close to 0.5. For a 2-state,
Moore neighborhood, 2D cellular automata, like
Conway's Life, the value is 0.273.
Personal life
Langton is the first-born son of
Jane Langton, author of books including the ''Homer Kelly Mysteries''. He has two adult sons: Gabe and Colin. He is an atheist.
["Chris Langton". NNDB.com. Retrieved 18 July 2012]
Major publications
* Christopher G. Langton. "Artificial Life: An Overview". (Editor), MIT Press, 1995.
* Christopher G. Langton. "Artificial Life III: Proceedings of the Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems". (Editor), Addison-Wesley, 1993.
* Christopher G. Langton. "Life at the Edge of Chaos". in "Artificial Life II", Addison-Wesley, 1991.
* Christopher G. Langton. "Artificial Life II: Proceedings of the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems". (Editor), Addison-Wesley, 1991.
* Christopher G. Langton. "Computation at the edge of chaos". ''Physica D'', 42, 1990.
* Christopher G. Langton. "Computation at the edge of Chaos: Phase-Transitions and Emergent Computation." Ph.D. Thesis,
University of Michigan
, mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth"
, former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821)
, budget = $10.3 billion (2021)
, endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
(1990).
* Christopher G. Langton. "Is There a Sharp Phase Transition for Deterministic Cellular Automata?", with W.K Wootters, ''Physica D'', 45, 1990.
* Christopher G. Langton. "Artificial Life: Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems". (Editor), Addison-Wesley, 1988.
* Christopher G. Langton. "Studying Artificial Life with Cellular Automata". ''Physica D'', 22, 1986.
* Christopher G. Langton. "Self Reproduction in Cellular Automata". ''Physica D'', 10, 1984.
;About Langton's work
* A. GaJardo, A. Moreira, E. Goles. "Complexity of Langton's Ant". ''Discrete Applied Mathematics'', 117, 2002.
* M. Boden. "The Philosophy of Artificial Life". ''Oxford University Press'', 1996.
* Stuart Kauffman. ''Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution''. Oxford University Press, 1993.
* Melanie Mitchell, Peter T. Hraber, and James P. Crutchfield.
Revisiting the edge of chaos: Evolving cellular automata to perform computations'. ''Complex Systems'', 7:89–130, 1993.
* Melanie Mitchell, James P. Crutchfield and Peter T. Hraber
Dynamics, Computation, and the "Edge of Chaos": A Re-Examination'
* J. P. Crutchfield and K. Young, "Computation at the Onset of Chaos", in ''Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information'', W. Zurek, editor, SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, VIII, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts (1990) pp. 223–269.
See also
*
Artificial life
*
Langton's loops
Langton's loops are a particular "species" of artificial life in a cellular automaton created in 1984 by Christopher Langton. They consist of a loop of cells containing genetic information, which flows continuously around the loop and out along a ...
*
Langton's ant
*
Cellular automata
References
External links
Explanation of Langton's LambdaThe Swarm development group
{{DEFAULTSORT:Langton, Christopher
American atheists
American computer scientists
Cellular automatists
Complex systems scientists
1949 births
Living people
Researchers of artificial life
University of Michigan alumni
Santa Fe Institute people