Artificial Chemistry - Important Contributors

Important Contributors

The first reference about artificial Chemistries come from a Technical paper written by John McCaskill. Walter Fontana working with Leo Buss then took up the work developing the AlChemy model. The model was presented at the second International Conference of Artificial Life. In his first papers he presented the concept of organization, as a set of molecules that is algebraically closed and self-maintaining.

Two main schools of artificial chemistries have been in Japan and Germany. In Japan the main researchers have been Takashi Ikegami, Hideaki Suzuki and Yasuhiro Suzuki. In Germany, it was Wolfgang Banzhaf, who, together with his students Peter Dittrich and Jens Ziegler, developed various artificial chemistry models. Their 2001 paper 'Artificial Chemistries - A Review' became a standard in the field. Jens Ziegler, as part of his PhD thesis, proved that an artificial chemistry could be used to control a small Khepera robot. Among other models, Peter Dittrich developed the Seceder model which is able to explain group formation in society through some simple rules. Since then he became a professor in Jena where he investigates artificial chemistries as a way to define a general theory of constructive dynamical systems.