This commitment to a digital basis for life sprouted up again and again in my interviews. It should not be surprising that this informational, abstract concept of life has something to do with the training many people have in computer engineering. I've been trained to look at things as processes, where the same process can be run in different ways on different hardware architectures. At the same time, of course, one needn't be a computer scientist to see things this way. Tom Ray, trained in evolutionary biology, is a case in point.
Digital dynamics animate the most fundamental operations of natural and artificial life forms.
Artificial life contrasts not with real life but with natural life. On the one hand, it is the phrase I first associated with the marvelous new interest that led me to design and develop PolyWorld. It is succinct, and reasonably descriptive. Whether artificial life could be genuine life is a substantial philosophical question, one that is more or less still open. Nature and life have been digitized.