What is life? Like most great questions, this one is easy to ask but difficult to answer. The reason is simple: we know of just one type of life and it’s challenging to do science with a sample size of one. The field of artificial life-called ALife for short — is the systematic attempt to spell out life’s fundamental principles. Many of these practitioners, so-called ALifers, think that somehow making life is the surest way to really understand what life is.

So far no one has convincingly made artificial life. This track record makes ALife a ripe target for criticism, such as declarations of the field’s doubtful scientific value. Alan Smith, a complexity scientist, is tired of such complaints. Asking about “the point” of ALife might be, well, missing the point entirely, he says. “The existence of a living system is not about the use of anything.” Alan says. “Some people ask me, ‘So what’s the worth of artificial life?’ Do you ever think, ‘What is the worth of your grandmother?’”

As much as many ALifers hate emphasizing their research’s applications, the attempts to create artificial life could have practical payoffs. Artificial intelligence may be considered ALife’s cousin in that researchers in both fields are enamored by a concept called open-ended evolution (演化). This is the capacity for a system to create essentially endless complexity, to be a sort of “novelty generator”. The only system known to exhibit this is Earth’s biosphere. If the field of ALife manages to reproduce life’s endless “creativity” in some virtual model, those same principles could give rise to truly inventive machines.

Compared with the developments of Al, advances in ALife are harder to recognize. One reason is that ALife is a field in which the central concept — life itself — is undefined. The lack of agreement among ALifers doesn’t help either. The result is a diverse line of projects that each advance along their unique paths. For better or worse, ALife mirrors the very subject it studies. Its muddled (混乱的) progression is a striking parallel (平行线) to the evolutionary struggles that have shaped Earth biosphere.

Undefined and uncontrolled, ALife drives its followers to repurpose old ideas and generated novelty. It may be, of course, that these characteristics aren’t in any way surprising or singular. They may apply universally to all acts of evolution. Ultimately ALife may be nothing special. But even this dismissal suggests something：perhaps, just like life itself throughout the universe, the rise of ALife will prove unavoidable.

A warning from science

When you're bored of some very boring task, what do you do? If you're like many, the answer is a no brainer: You reach for your phone. If that sounds familiar, a new unpublished study has bad news.【小题1】

The problem isn't taking a break. Previous studies show that we get more done overall if we take regular, short breaks. The problem is your phone. Dutch research shows most of us carry around a boredom-increasing machine in our pockets. To figure out the relationship between phones and boredom, A Dutch research team fixed an app on the phones of 83 volunteers to track how often they used their devices. They also asked these volunteers to keep diaries for three days, recording their level of tiredness and boredom every hour.

【小题2】 “Phone breaks were frequent: In the 20 minutes following each survey, participants (参与者) picked up their phones 52 percent of the time. They spent an average of around 90 seconds on it each time,” reports the findings on the British Psychological Society Research Digest blog.

Equally unsurprising was the second finding: 【小题3】 The real unexpected thing was the final finding. While we look to our phones to relieve tiredness and boredom, screen time seemed to increase feelings of boredom. “Participants actually reported higher levels of boredom after having used their smartphones,” notes BPS.

【小题4】 Switching from work to your phone and back may end up being more mentally tiring than refreshing. Picking up your phone from time to time might serve as a reminder of all the things out there you could be doing if you didn't have to fill out paperwork.

This one study can't definitively say if either of these explanations is right, but the idea it communicates is clear. You think a glance at your phone is going to make you feel less bored, but it's actually going to make your brain feel more tired.