Lenia: Continuous Cellular Automata

Bert Chan has been working on continuous cellular automata for a while. Unlike the more familiar grad-based artificial life (represented most famously by Conway’s Life) its interactions take place in a continuous space. The latest research generalizes it into “higher dimensions, multiple kernels, and multiple channels”.

One interesting thing here from a procgen perspective is the use of tools to search the algorithmic space for interesting new patterns. Searching the generative space is a tricky problem. Chan wanted to explore both the genotypes (the set of rules) and the phenotypes (the configurations of the worlds, e.g. Game of Life’s 2d grid). The approach incorporates both human-in-the-loop filtering and search algorithms. The search algorithms run the gamut from straightforward depth first random searches to genetic algorithms.

Using these tools, Chan found all kinds of phenomena: from expected things like locomotion to hoped-for things like self-replication to even more interesting emergent behavior like division of labor and emergent differentiation.

If you’d like to look at it yourself, the software is now open-source: https://github.com/Chakazul/Lenia

(via hardmaru)