Artificial Life using a Book and Bookmarker
This work addresses the need for more expressive artificial life models for researchers in computational biology and AI, though it appears incremental as it builds on prior cellular automata and Sims models.
The authors tackled the problem of limited expressive power in existing artificial life models by proposing a new model that simulates reproduction, development, and individual interactions with high freedom in morphology and behavior, resulting in virtual creatures exhibiting unique survival strategies and interesting properties.
Reproduction, development, and individual interactions are essential topics in artificial life. The cellular automata, which can handle these in a composite way, is highly restricted in its form and behavior because it represents life as a pattern of cells. In contrast, the virtual creatures proposed by Karl Sims have a very high degree of freedom in terms of morphology and behavior. However, they have limited expressive capacity in terms of those viewpoints. This study carefully extracts the characteristics of the cellular automata and Sims models to propose a new artificial life model that can simulate reproduction, development, and individual interactions while exhibiting high expressive power for morphology and behavior. The simulation was performed by sequentially reading a book with genetic information and repeatedly executing four actions: expansion, connection, disconnection, and transition. The virtual creatures in the proposed model exhibit unique survival strategies and lifestyles and acquire interesting properties in reproduction, development, and individual interactions while having freedom in morphology and behavior.