Artificial Life
From the AAAI website: "Artificial Life ("AL" or "Alife") is the name given to a new discipline that studies "natural" life by attempting to recreate biological phenomena from scratch within computers and other "artificial" media. Alife complements the traditional analytic approach of traditional biology with a synthetic approach in which, rather than studying biological phenomena by taking apart living organisms to see how they work, one attempts to put together systems that behave like living organisms." - Chris Langdon
There is a spectrum of work in which Langdon is at one end and Brooks can be thought of at the other. At Langdon's end, the goal is to create virtual simulations (nothing physical) that exhibit characterisitics such as evolutionary change and emergent complexity. Much of this work was done in conjunction with the Santa Fe Institute, and was big a decade ago. Much of the excitement around it has died down. At Brooks' end, roboticists use models from real organisms to organize their structure. Early works in this vein included an artificial cockroach, and it has been a feature of Brooks' MIT research for the last 15 years or so. Although both are biologically inspired, the goals and methods are quite different.
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