Steve Grand wants to be

Steve Grand wants to be a “latter-day Baron Frankenstein” according to this New York Times article on artificial life: Man Who Would Be God: Giving Robots Life. He comes across in the article as a genuine latter-day eccentric Englishman, the clever kind, not the unbalanced kind. He’s written a book about his adventures creating artificial life (Creation : Life and How to Make It). The thing that sets him apart from other a-life hobbyists is that he’s written a bone-fide game bestseller that’s based on a-life. Called Creatures, it’s popular enough to give him the money he needs to fund more ambitious research. It’s exciting to think that a-life is now self-sustaining in terms of revenue, even if it’s not very advanced yet.