In another thread Guadere was kind enough to post a link to a sight explaining artificial life:
http://www.infidels.org/~meta/getalife/index.html
From here one can read up on the subject and follow links to Tom Ray’s Tierra home page.
From there if you wish, you can download a copy of Tierra easily and have artificial life “living” on your computer.
In the near future Mr. Ray plans to release a network version of Tierra, that will create a “Digitial Preserve” across the internet, wherein these artificial creatures will live there lives, interact, and evolve.
These “organisms” perform most if not all of the requisites for them to be categorized as “life.”
Are they alive? and if so do they have rights?
Do I commit murder if I erase the program?
Will they evolve to sentience, come to question their evolution, hypothesize a creator (correctly,) break free and take over the world?
Or, are they just a toy, demonstrating nothing?
Often wrong… NEVER in doubt