Bert Chan
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Flow-Lenia: Towards open-ended evolution in cellular automata through mass conservation and parameter localization
Erwan Plantec
Gautier Hamon
Mayalen Etcheverry
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Clément Moulin-Frier
ALIFE 2023: The 2023 Conference on Artificial Life, MIT Press (2023)
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The design of complex self-organising systems producing life-like phenomena, such as the open-ended evolution of virtual creatures, is one of the main goals of artificial life. Lenia, a family of cellular automata (CA) generalizing Conway's Game of Life to continuous space, time and states, has attracted a lot of attention because of the wide diversity of self-organizing patterns it can generate. Among those, some spatially localized patterns (SLPs) resemble life-like artificial creatures and display complex behaviors. However, those creatures are found in only a small subspace of the Lenia parameter space and are not trivial to discover, necessitating advanced search algorithms. Furthermore, each of these creatures exist only in worlds governed by specific update rules and thus cannot interact in the same one. This paper proposes as mass-conservative extension of Lenia, called Flow Lenia, that solve both of these issues. We present experiments demonstrating its effectiveness in generating SLPs with complex behaviors and show that the update rule parameters can be optimized to generate SLPs showing behaviors of interest. Finally, we show that Flow Lenia enables the integration of the parameters of the CA update rules within the CA dynamics, making them dynamic and localized, allowing for multi-species simulations, with locally coherent update rules that define properties of the emerging creatures, and that can be mixed with neighbouring rules. We argue that this paves the way for the intrinsic evolution of self-organized artificial life forms within continuous CAs.
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Towards Large-Scale Simulations of Open-Ended Evolution in Continuous Cellular Automata
GECCO '23: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, ACM (2023)
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Inspired by biological and cultural evolution, there have been many attempts to explore and elucidate the necessary conditions for open-endedness in artificial intelligence and artificial life. Using a continuous cellular automata called Lenia as the base system, we built large-scale evolutionary simulations using parallel computing framework JAX, in order to achieve the goal of never-ending evolution of self-organizing patterns. We report a number of system design choices, including (1) implicit implementation of genetic operators, such as reproduction by pattern self-replication and selection by differential existential success; (2) localization of genetic information; and (3) algorithms for dynamically maintenance of the localized genotypes and translation to phenotypes. Simulation results tend to go through a phase of diversity and creativity, gradually converge to domination by fast expanding patterns, presumably a optimal solution under the current design. Based on our experimentation, we propose several factors that may further facilitate open-ended evolution, such as virtual environment design, mass conservation, and energy constraints.
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Lenia and Expanded Universe
Artificial Life Conference Proceedings (2020), 221–229
Lenia: Biology of Artificial Life
Complex Systems, vol. 28(3) (2019), 251–286
