2如何翻译 ALife

What is life? Like most great questions this one is

easy to ask but difficult to answer. The reason is simple: we know of just one

type of life and it’s challenging to do science with a sample size of one. The

field of artificial life—called ALife for short—is

the systematic attempt to spell out life’s fundamental principles. Many of

these practitioners, so-called ALifers,

think that somehow making life is the surest way to really understand what life

is.

So far no one has convincingly made artificial life.

This track record makes ALife a ripe

target for criticism, such as declarations of the field’s doubtful scientific

value. Alan Smith, a complexity scientist, is tired of such complaints. Asking

about “the point” of ALife might be,

well, missing the point entirely, he says. “The existence of a living system is

not about the use of anything.” Alan says. “Some people ask me, ‘So what’s the

worth of artificial life?’ Do you ever think, ‘What is the worth of your

grandmother?’”

As much as many ALifers

hate emphasizing their research’s applications, the attempts to create

artificial life could have practical payoffs. Artificial intelligence may be

considered ALife’s cousin in that

researchers in both fields are enamored by a concept called open-ended

evolution (演化). This is the capacity for a system to create

essentially endless complexity, to be a sort of “novelty generator”. The only

system known to exhibit this is Earth’s biosphere. If the field of ALife manages to reproduce life’s

endless “creativity” in some virtual model, those same principles could give

rise to truly inventive machines.

Compared with the developments of Al, advances in ALife are harder to recognize. One

reason is that ALife is a field in

which the central concept — life itself — is undefined. The lack of agreement

among ALifers doesn’t help either.

The result is a diverse line of projects that each advance along their unique

paths. For better or worse, ALife

mirrors the very subject it studies. Its muddled (混乱的) progression is

a striking parallel (平行线) to the evolutionary struggles that have shaped

Earth biosphere.

Undefined and uncontrolled, ALife drives its followers to repurpose old ideas and generated

novelty. It may be, of course, that these characteristics aren’t in any way

surprising or singular. They may apply universally to all acts of evolution.

Ultimately ALife may be nothing

special. But even this dismissal suggests something：perhaps, just like

life itself throughout the universe, the rise of ALife will prove unavoidable.

上面的文章为2023年高考英语北京卷的的阅读理解。

请问文中的 ALife是什么意思？