ALife is something that fits the definition of life, but is not created by nature, it is created by man. It challenges our conception of life itself and forces us to consider a new definition of life.
Work done in the field of aLife is largely philosophical.
From attempting to reproduce life in the computer, biologists have come up with new ideas regarding the nature and purpose of life. Although great advances have been made in the area of artificially creating life, aLife forms remain distinctly artificial without a comparable amount of complexity that natural life exhibits. Biologists are not the only ones intersted in aLife. Programmers and computer scientists adapt studies in aLife to create better programs and new innovative ways of sovling problems. Artificial life is a diverse field which covers a number of topics including cellular automata, genetic algorithms, and neural networks.