Christopher Langton

Who is Christopher Langton?

Christopher Langton 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" at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987.

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 and Per Bak among others.

A graduate of the University of Michigan, 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.