ApeSDK
An artificial life software platform, originally called Noble Ape, that has been under continuous development since 1996. It is populated by agents with complex cognitive models and social interactions. These…
The Encyclopedia of Artificial Life
Sub-fields of Artificial Life
Artificial Chemistries
Artificial Chemistry is a subfield of Artificial Life that seeks to explore the “emergence, evolution, and behavior of life” via simulations of molecular processes . In this field, researchers study…
Artificial Ecologies
Like evolution, ecology is a central force within living and life-like systems. It stands to reason, then, that artificial ecologies come up in many different areas of ALife. For a…
Artificial Life
What is it? Artificial Life (ALife, a-life, Alife) is a very broad field that intersects with many other fields, including biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, art, philosophy, astronomy, and more.…
Avida
The Avida Digital Evolution Platform is an open-source artificial life system that has been used to conduct a wide range of studies on evolutionary dynamics . In Avida, self-replicating computer…
Cellular Automata
A cellular automaton (plural: cellular automata) is composed of a grid of cells. Traditionally, cells can be in a finite number of discrete states, although some more modern variations on…
Digital Evolution
Overview https://youtu.be/2kiKt71dN8U Digital evolution systems are a class of Artificial Life systems in which populations of computational agents undergo evolution . These systems generally encode the three ingredients for evolution…
Droplets
Liquid droplets are a research platform used in ALife to study the emergence of complex life-like behaviors from fairly simple combinations of chemicals. Droplets are created by putting a drop…
Evolutionary Robotics
Evolutionary robotics is a sub-field of artificial life in which evolutionary algorithms are used to evolve robot morphology (i.e. shape) and/or behavior. Sometimes these robots exist only in simulation, while other times evolved morphologies and behaviors are translated out of the computer and into physical robots.
Evolutionary Substrate
An evolutionary substrate is the genetic material on which evolution is acting. For instance, in biological evolution, the substrate is DNA. In artificial life systems, it could be anything from…
Fitness
Fitness is a quantification of an individual's evolutionary success. In biology, an individual's fitness is generally measured as the number of offspring that individual has. Many artificial life platforms operate…
Fitness Landscape
A fitness landscape is a mapping from a combination of trait values to a fitness. They are generally visualized so as to make it clear which trait values are closer…
Game Theory
Evolutionary Games In the context of evolutionary biology, the two basic notions of game theory, namely strategy and payoff, have to be re-interpreted. A strategy is not a deliberate course…
Games
There have been many games or game-like simulations that feature an artificial life perspective: Species: Artificial Life, Real Evolution The Sapling Game Orb Farm Open Constructor Sandspiel Club, Programmable app…
Phenotype
In biology, a phenotype is some observable property of an individual that is encoded by its genes (often in combination with its environment). In artificial life, phenotype means roughly the…
Reservoir Computing
Reservoir Computing (RC) consists of a learning machine that maps input signals to a higher dimensional space through the dynamics of a fixed, non-linear reservoir; the embedding produced by the…
Stringmol
Stringmol is a “string-based programming language”, which uses encoded molecules as strings of operation code . It acts as an artificial chemistry system that displays the continuous appearance of chemical…
Synthetic Biology
Synthetic biology is a subarea of artificial life and genetic engineering that involves the redesign of existing life for new and/or ameliorated purposes, as well as the artificial creation of…