Creation
by Steve Grand · first published 2000
8mentions
4recommended by
8HN commenters
2010–2025first – last mentioned
50% recommend50% neutral
"Working mostly alone, almost singlehandedly writing 250,000 lines of computer code, Steve Grand produced Creatures, a revolutionary computer game that allowed players to create living beings complete with brains, genes, and hormonal systems - creatures that would live and breathe and breed in real time on an ordinary desktop computer. Enormously successful, the game inevitably raises the question: What is artificial life? And in this book - a chance for the devoted fan and the simply curious onlookers to see the world from the perspective of an original philosopher-engineer and intellectual
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The book called Creation by Steve Grand has great arguments in favor of the analogie. I came across it as the favorite book of Jeff Bezos. Sorry, I know this is a weak response to your argument but it would be too much to cover…
on “Ask HN: As a Facebook or Google engineer, do you consider your company evil?” ↗There is a great book written 20 years ago by Steve Grand called "Creation: Life and how to make it"[1] it basically uses the game Creatures[2] as the testing environment for creating Artificial Life. There are some great thoughts in that book also about how science needs more…
on “In Newly Created Life-Form, a Major Mystery” ↗…Dennett "Consciousness Explained" How the mind works? - J.E Gordon: "The new Science of Strog Materials" & " Structures, or why things don't fall down." How is 'stuff' strong/hard? - Steve Grand: "Creation" & "Growing up with Lucy" The programmer behind the game 'Creatures' and his adventures in artificial life. - Joseph Campbell: "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" Never look at Star Wars in the same way…
on “Ask HN: Interesting (Non software) books?” ↗It sounds like you've maybe read Steve Grand's book, Creation: Life and How To make It? That is his entire pitch; if you've not read it I wholly recommend it.
on “Neural nets are not “slightly conscious,” and AI PR can do with less hype” ↗At the same time, Bezos became enamored with a book called Creation, by Steve Grand, the developer of a 1990s video game called Creatures that allowed players to guide and nurture a seemingly intelligent organism on their computer screens. Grand wrote that his approach…
on “How AWS came to be” ↗I first learned about cybernetics through the book Creation: Life and How to Make It by Steve Grand. Grand created the Creatures video game and applied ideas from cybernetics. As a result, each Norn (the name of the fictional species the game is about) has a genome,…
on “A Software Engineer’s Guide to Cybernetics” ↗IIRC It’s Steve Grand’s contention in Creation: Life And How To Make It that we will only get artificial consciousness with artificial biological drives.
on “Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain” ↗It's not quite getting that far. Steve Grand (the guy who wrote the Creatures video game) wrote a book, Creation: life and how to make it about this (famously instead of a PhD thesis, at Richard Dawkins' suggestion): https://archive.org/details/creation00stev His contention is not that there's some non-replicable…
on “GPT-5: "How many times does the letter b appear in blueberry?"” ↗