For children of the last twenty years born into this modern life, these technological marvels seem like elements of the periodic table: a given ingredient that is simply part of the universe. Younger generations don’t even try to imagine life without modern conveniences. They do not appreciate theunprecedented (史无前例的) technology that is in their possession; rather, they complain about the ways in which it fails to live up to ideal expectations. “My digital video recorder at home doesn’t allow me to program it from my computer at work.” “It’s taking too long for this interactive map to display on my portable GPS”.

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.

Lam Hon-ming, director of the State Key Laboratory at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is a top expert in soybean (大豆) research. Since 1998, Lam’s team has been cooperating with scientists in Chinese mainland. In 2010, he came across Zhang Guohong, an agricultural expert from Gansu, China, at a national soybean conference. With the same major, they hit it off and decided to improve farmers’ lives and promote local agriculture.

Farmers in Gansu depend largely on the weather for their livelihood, mainly on rainfall, which is also a cause of severe poorness in the area. In 2016, they developed three new soybean varieties suited to salty soil and rare rainfall of Northwest China. All received official government approval.

As the land in Northwest China is not suitable for the growth of common varieties of soybeans, local farmers never planted soybeans, and it became a major problem for spreading new soybeans. Lam and Zhang increased communication with farmers through various ways. To ensure farmers’ income, Lam struck a partnership with a Hong Kong food company that will purchase all soybeans at market price when they are harvested.

By 2020, the planting area of the three approved soybeans in Gansu had gone beyond 2.4 million square kilometers, covering 46 of the province’s 80-plus counties, and the output had reached 7.71 million kilograms, adding about 30 million yuan to local farmers’ income.

Zhang said that Professor Lam’s contribution has greatly pushed the poorness relief and agricultural research in Northwest China. “It is hard to keep doing agricultural research with less funding. And it is more difficult to travel from Hong Kong to the poor areas of the Northwest to do agricultural research,” he added. In the future, Lan will continue to work with mainland scientists and lead more “Hong Kong power” into the development of the country’s Northwest.