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…
The Encyclopedia of Artificial Life
Sub-fields of Artificial Life
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…
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…