{"product_id":"what-is-life","title":"What Is Life? - Evolution as Computation","description":"\u003cb\u003eWhat life is, and how its essence can be understood as computation that grows more complex over time in symbiotic relationships.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1944, quantum mechanics pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wrote a slim but influential volume, \u003ci\u003eWhat Is Life?\u003c\/i\u003e, posing the primary question that rendered biology so mysterious to a physicist. How can life and all its attendant complexities come to exist in a random universe, governed by simple laws, whose disorder only increases over time?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis small book, richly illustrated and written for a general audience, offers a deep and surprising answer, drawing on decades of theory and existing literature as well as recent experiments in artificial life. Beginning with ideas developed by Alan Turing and John von Neumann in the mid-twentieth century, Agüera y Arcas shows how self-reproduction, hence life, is inherently computational. Life evolves spontaneously in environments capable of supporting computation, like our own universe, and grows more complex over time as it enters symbiotic relationships with itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e What Is Life?\u003c\/i\u003e is also the first part of Agüera y Arcas’s larger book \u003ci\u003eWhat Is Intelligence?\u003c\/i\u003e, which further develops a computational and symbiotic perspective on intelligence, from simple organisms to brains and societies to AI.","brand":"Penguin Random House","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51306384294176,"sku":"9780262554091","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0836\/3661\/7504\/files\/9780262554091.jpg?v=1772779178","url":"https:\/\/creativebysanchez.com\/products\/what-is-life","provider":"Creative By Sanchez","version":"1.0","type":"link"}