Christopher Langton

Christopher Langton coined the term “artificial life” in the late 1980s and organized the field’s inaugural event, the Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (Artificial Life I), at Los Alamos National Laboratory in September 1987. As a graduate student at the University of Michigan — where he completed a PhD in 1990 with the dissertation “Computation at the Edge of Chaos: Phase Transitions and Emergent Computation” — he devised Langton’s ant and Langton’s loops, simple cellular-automaton rules that generate open-ended complex behavior, and the lambda parameter, a measure for locating where a cellular automaton sits between order and chaos. After Los Alamos he continued his research at the Santa Fe Institute before departing academic publishing in the late 1990s.