Towards the identification of living agents in complex computational environments

Artificial life is a knowledge area which proposes that life is not constrained to exist in organic material or even in information structures. In this paper, we propose a heuristic formal method to determine whether there exist living creatures in an information structure of a given computational environment. We consider not quantification of the biodiversity of the system. Our proposal is strongly based on the study of the evolution of the entropy of the different parts of the studied system. We consider living beings as low-entropy structures increasing the existing entropy in their environment, as stated by I. Prigogine and I. Stengers (1984). Let us remark that we consider that entropy is a relative concept which depends on the rational model we use to interpret a given environment. We formalize these rational models as compression strategies. These strategies allow us to reduce the length of a given information flow to a reduced structure where its relevant features (according to the rational model) are represented in a compact way. This allows us to determine whether there are active entities decreasing the entropy in some parts, while increasing it in the rest of the world.