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.

Langton in: Karl Gerbel, Peter Weibel, Katharina Gsöllpointner (1993) Genetische Kunst--künstliches Leben. p.25