Student books : Artificial life

Herbert A. Simon believes there’s entirely too much natural science about.
Why should engineering—the avocation which makes things happen—not
get the status of science? His The Sciences of the Artificial (MIT,
£12.50, ISBN 0 262 69191 4) began with lectures in 1968, and his
thoroughly-updated third edition is a must-read for his “Carnegie-Mellon
symbolicist” takes on human memory and its place in consciousness, economics,
complexity, and social policy-making.