Two scientists in this Economist article have different visions of artificial life. David Harel from Israel's Weizmann Institute wants to create a computer model of C. elegans, saying that scientists will only fully understand what goes on during development when an artificial model exactly follows the processes in the live model. Stephen Emmott, who works at Microsoft Research, is working on building a computer from biological parts to make an artificial scientist that can catch relationships hidden in the data that a human would miss.
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