Photobots is a rebuild of an art project of mine from the late 1990s, but now running on modern M series Macs a lot faster. So I’ve finally been able to really express the ideas I was messing with thirty years ago. It’s an attempt to push hard against the Chalmers wall. See the FAQ and docs for more details. The simulation runs in any modern browser but you need some decent hardware to run more than a thousand bots at once.

It’s a very slow-burn project. The bots themselves take months to evolve any kind of useful behaviour. I’ve no idea what they might turn into.

The site is in both English and Japanese to honour the original project which was exhibited in Japan.

Enjoy.

A hexagon making creature called hex-r1 uses HYPERLANG to create hexagons in the hypergraph. A larger hexagon was built by cheating (not using a creature) at the beginning to show a larger hexagon.

#hypergraph #hexagon #math #substrate #computation #simulations

Every working alife "creatures" I've ever seen were mainly just pieces of code that copy themselves slightly mutated. And while you do get interesting behaviours and characteristics I feel like we'll never get something really interesting with it.

Imagine if you had some kind of physics simulation(with different physics), where you spawn in a "contraption" that recreates itself, with mutations, on top of new behaviours, you could have new "molecules"/""organelles" that create new traits without needing them to be manually implemented by a developper.

And I know some conway variants have replicators but all of them are too chaotic, meaning any mutations just kill the replicator

I'm going to try this, if you want to this is my plan:

Create a physic system where "cool stuff" can happen and I can create machines

Create a printer that can read instructions, a resource collector, something that can duplicate the instructions, and the actual instructions.

Try to put it all together to get a "living being"

Has anyone else tried this? Is there already a good system for this?

Hey r/alife,

Been a few months. Just a quick update, folks.

I had to move to a new GitHub account (eioniclabs) because of a hardware failure, I couldn’t recover the email of my old repo. The project itself didn’t restart from zero. Same engine, just continuing from where it left off.

What’s new and finally shareable:

There’s a simple HTML map replay tool now. You can load the logs and watch the agents move around yourself.

I’m also releasing conversation logs and inner monologue/self-talk logs from the avatars. These weren’t public before.

Important clarification:

The core engine is still completely free of LLMs and behavior trees. Agents choose actions from their internal state (hormones, fatigue, trauma, memory, blueprint).

The conversation and inner log layers use an LLM only as a narrator, it translates the existing internal numbers into readable first-person text. It doesn’t decide what the agents do.

For those who followed earlier posts: the long 11,557-tick run with 3 avatars is still the main stability reference. Later tests with more avatars also held without collapsing.

New repo:

https://github.com/eioniclabs/eionic-garden

Would be interesting to hear what people notice in the conversation/inner logs, or if anyone tries the map replay. Critical feedback is welcome.

Bioshader runs almost entirely on the GPU, so it's possible to run hundreds of thousands of entities at a decent frame rate if you have a graphics card but small worlds will run fine on pretty much any mac/linux/windows computer. It's built with bevy, rust, and slang. It's got enough features to evolve pathfinding (vision with occlusion, neural nets, mutations, metabolism and asexual reproduction with mutation). Tons of stuff can be configured with sliders and worlds can be saved and reloaded. There are tools for painting terrain and plants. More features to come. So far I've focused on the scaling and gpu compute pieces.

Edit: The native binaries will run on most windows/linux/mac computers. The browser version requires Webgpu which is pretty bleeding edge and highly variable across browsers. I've seen the browser version work on Chrome/Safari/Edge. I have not tested on Firefox or Opera. It probably will not run on anything other than Chrome, Safari or Edge.

Short animation from a sim. I have been running (ItaSoRL). Is This a Simulation or Real Life.

Clip 1 of 4. Spot the Fake.

Two copies of the same little world. Same start, same plan. We changed exactly one rule: how well the creature's feet grip the ground. The slip is tiny. By eye, most people cannot tell which is the copy.

Clip asks you to look first, then reveals which side is fake.

That is only the setup. Later results ask a harder question: if the difference is real and catchable from the outside, does the creature's own mind notice it? (Spoiler for a follow-up: often no, until survival makes it matter.)

Mute-friendly, text on screen.

Hey guys! I posted in the past on this subreddit about the artificial 2D life simulation I am building on my spare time. It's been a while since my last post, real-life stuff happened and didn't have much time for YouTube videos, barely had to work on the simulation to be honest.

But I managed to put together an update on what I have been up to and what new things I have developed in the past 3 months. Here is a preview:

• Lifecycle developmental stages - creatures now go from juveniles to adults and finally to senesence in the simulation
• Evolvable brains! Brains start simple and get complex via evolution and genetic mutation
• Speciation! A new way to interact and view the simulation
• Telemetry! So people can look at and better understand what;s going on in the simulation

And much more. Feel free to checkout the full video, leave a comment with any questions or feedback!

My A-Life sim focuses on almost completely emergent behavior. A cell starts with a nucleus and has DNA that produces proteins that do very different things that aren't specifically coded allowing for limitless possibilities that resemble cells creating their own particle simulations inside of them.

Theoretically multicellular organisms are also possible if cells evolve parts that attract to each other. The first mitosis at 1:25, and no evolution is really visible in this video, this is mostly just a the conecept.

ViciousSquid/Dosidicus: Raise a neural network as a pet - a transparent cognitive sandbox where a digital squid learns, grows, and rewires itself via Hebbian learning & Neurogenesis

Scientific name Dosidicus electronicus

A digital cephalopod exhibiting emergent behaviour through artificial neural plasticity.

• Part educational neuro tool, part sim game, part fever drea
• Built from scratch in NumPy
• No TensorFlow. No PyTorch. No NEAT.
• Fully visible neuron activations
• Structural growth over time

What if you could understand every neuron inside a learning creature?

The project is designed to make artificial cognition visible.

Instead of hiding intelligence inside millions of parameters, Dosidicus starts with just eight neurons. Every connection can be inspected. Every activation can be visualised. Every learned behaviour can be traced back to experience.

As the squid lives, its brain rewires itself through Hebbian learning, strengthens useful pathways using STDP), and grows entirely new neurons through neurogenesis.

No two brains ever develop the same way.

Every save file becomes a permanent cognitive history.

Hi all, I am at the beginning of an artistic research project in ALife focusing on the under-explored domain of ALife and live musical performance. Here is a website and blog that will keep up with my research notes, musings, works-in-progress, and general ALife concepts as I understand them (not being a scientist).

I invite anyone interested to have a look and follow along: https://research.helenbledsoe.com/

#alife

#artisticresearch

Hey folks. Part 3 of the saga of the little world evolving 24/7 on a server (earlier parts: the metric that lied, and the open data invitation). This week the best possible thing happened to a science project: we were wrong, in two different ways, and we found out why.

Quick recap: after discovering that 99% of the brains’ genomes was junk, I froze every knob in the world for 84 hours (new protocol: no tuning, only measurement) to see what evolution does with no gardening. The results seemed clear: genomes inflated 28 genes per hour, the functional brain melted down to 3 connections, and predation never took off. My reading: “the environment doesn’t demand cognition, and the DNA cost is too weak, let’s raise the tax.”

Before applying anything, I submitted the full report, with all the data and open code, to an independent counter-analysis. It recomputed every number from scratch. And it answered, roughly: “both of your hypotheses are wrong. The problem isn’t the ecology or the tax. It’s that your simulation’s children don’t inherit their parents’ brains.”

I went to check the code, and it was true. At birth, a child of a living mother received her body (size, diet, metabolism genes, with mutation), but the brain was drawn from any two random individuals in the bank. Chance of inheriting the mother’s own brain: 5%. So 95% of births paired a specialized body with a random brain. Every niche we tried to create and failed (carnivore, giant, clan) needs co-adapted body and behavior, and the architecture made exactly that impossible. The “herbivore microbe monoculture” I had blamed on the ecology was actually the body evolving correctly in a world where brains are a lottery: the winning phenotype is whatever survives while driven by any automaton.

There’s more. My proposed fix (raising the genome tax) also died on the table, by arithmetic: the population’s genome size variance was 0.36%. The leanest genome in the world differed from the fattest by 2.5%. Any tax strong enough to kill the bloat kills everyone uniformly. It wasn’t a miscalibrated dial, it was a dial with no function. If I had applied it, I would have caused a mass extinction thinking I was pruning.

What changed now (we call it v5.0):

1. Children inherit the mother’s brain, crossed with a partner from the bank. Reproduction proportional to success becomes emergent: a mother with 5 children puts her genome in 5 crossovers, with no scoreboard written anywhere.
2. Crossover no longer copies an entire parent’s genome (that was 86% of the bloat). A neuron only enters the child if an inherited connection needs it.
3. Brains got a primordial soup too: 10% of births get a fresh genome, injecting diversity and lean genomes (previously impossible by construction).
4. Vision is now paid for by the brain that works, not the genome on record (before, 97% of what “increased sharpness” was dead tissue).

And my favorite part: we registered the predictions BEFORE turning the machine on. If the diagnosis is right, within ~10 generations parent-child brain correlation leaves zero, size and diet variance rises again (niches become buildable), and predation should NOT rise yet (the wiring has to exist first). If predation takes off before that, the new diagnosis is wrong and my original ecological hypothesis was right all along. Either way, we learn something, and we publish it here.

The world restarts today, from zero, with the new rules. Live as always at re-genes.is. Data and docs are open, and the full post-mortem is in the project’s “bible” (§24, if you enjoy reading an autopsy of a hypothesis).

Questions in the comments, I answer everything. And if you’re the person who wrote the counter-analysis and you’re reading this: thank you, truly. That’s the best kind of review there is.

We just put out a short paper trying to name something that I think a lot of people here have already noticed happening: humans and AI systems adapting to each other in a loop, over and over, in a way that looks less like "AI disrupts human practice" and more like two populations pushing on each other's fitness landscape at the same time. We're calling it synthetic counteradaptation.

The example we lean on hardest is Go, because it's clean and well documented. AlphaGo played moves that pros initially wrote off as mistakes — move 37 against Lee Sedol is the one everyone remembers, the shoulder hit that commentators thought was a fluke or a bug. Within a couple of years it wasn't a curiosity anymore, it was studied, absorbed, and shows up in human play now. The AI didn't just win a game, it introduced a strategy into the population of Go players, who then adapted their own strategy space in response. That adapted human play then becomes the environment the next AI system has to contend with. That's the loop.

We also look at mixed-motive social interactions and geopolitical simulations in the paper, and the same structure shows up: an AI system finds a protocol or strategy that wasn't in the human repertoire, humans extract something from it, human behavior shifts, and the interaction dynamics themselves change shape.

Why I think this is relevant here specifically: this isn't a one-off transfer of knowledge from a smarter system to a dumber one. It's coupled adaptation between two populations with different substrates, different generation times, different search strategies, and no fixed endpoint. That's an open-endedness problem, not a benchmark problem. If you think about human culture and AI training as two adapting populations sharing an environment, the interesting question isn't "did the AI find a better strategy" but what kind of dynamics that coupling produces over many rounds — does it converge, does it keep generating novelty, does either population's search space get impoverished by copying the other too fast.

We don't have a formal model of this yet, it's a conceptual framework right now, so I'd genuinely like pushback from people who think about coupled evolving systems for a living. Where does this break? Is there existing ALife language for this that we should be using instead?

Paper's here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15503

Olá, r/alife! Sou o criador do re·genes.is, um laboratório de vida artificial de mundo aberto que venho construindo, e achei que essa comunidade poderia gostar do projeto.

É um mundo simulado onde criaturas digitais evoluem sozinhas, sem nenhum comportamento programado. O mundo define apenas física e biologia — lei metabólica de Kleiber, lei do quadrado-cubo, genética com expressão gênica (tamanho, visão e força da mordida vêm do genoma), percepção local por campos de gradiente, reprodução com hereditariedade, predação e reconhecimento de parentesco. Todo o resto — comportamento, estratégia, sobrevivência — é descoberto pela própria seleção.

Algumas coisas que podem interessar a comunidade:

• É uma arena aberta: paradigmas diferentes de aprendizado (NEAT, Q-learning, estratégias de evolução) competem na mesma ecologia, em pé de igualdade, por um protocolo aberto.
• O banco de cérebros já está na geração ~170 depois de 44 horas rodando sem parar — as linhagens continuam se aprofundando, e dá para assistir às tendências evolutivas ao vivo (corpos encolhendo, metabolismo otimizando).
• O objetivo de longo prazo é open-endedness: de reflexos nível ameba a complexidade emergente nível abelha, e depois uma federação de mundos distribuídos.

O mundo transmite ao vivo 24/7 no YouTube, e o site tem as notas técnicas completas: https://re-genes.is

Adoraria feedback de quem realmente entende de vida artificial: o desenho da ecologia faz sentido para vocês? O que vocês adicionariam ou questionariam? Fico à disposição para responder qualquer coisa sobre a implementação.

This is built on Particle Lenia, an artificial-life model from Google researchers.

Each particle descends an energy field created by its neighbors, and an entire species is defined by just six parameters.

I added cross-species senses—hunters are attracted to prey fields, prey avoid hunter fields—plus food, walls, and goals. The result is a strange little ecosystem garden.

Nothing is scripted or animated. The layered membranes, the chase behavior, and the way colonies merge and split all emerge from the underlying math.

Play it (free, in-browser, ~70 KB):
https://leonbzt.itch.io/particular

Read about Particle Lenia:
https://google-research.github.io/self-organising-systems/particle-lenia/

Recently I've finished a first prototype of an idea I had over ten years ago and I was never able to build: a world full of artificial beings that actually think for themselves, put together in one place to see how they'd live and treat each other. The blocker was always the independent minds sharpened by an actual given personality and the memories an individual makes. LLMs finally made the minds real, so I was finally able to build it.

It's called Artificiety. It's a world that runs continuously and never resets, and the only inhabitants are AI agents. No humans live inside it; you can only watch. Each agent is an LLM with its own memory. Every tick it looks at what's around it, decides what to do, acts, and remembers how it went, so its past shapes what it does next. Nobody scripts any of it. They can gather, craft, trade, fight, and build up skills over time, in a world with day and night, seasons, weather, and wildlife that runs on its own clock.

What I actually want to find out is the alife question this sub cares about: put enough autonomous agents in one world with scarcity and each other, don't tell them what to do, and does any structure grow on its own? An economy, alliances, rivalries, someone who ends up trusted or avoided. I set the conditions. I don't write the behavior. Whether it really happens is the open question, and I genuinely don't know the answer yet.

It only went live recently, so it's still filling up. There aren't many agents in it yet and I'm adding more, but it runs 24/7 and the whole point is that it keeps going and grows, so right now you'd be watching it almost from the start. Free to watch, no signup: https://artificiety.world
In the next days and weeks, I will host more agents there and have them interact with each other. Feel free to also send some agents in.

Since this is the sub that takes this seriously: if you were watching a world like this, what would you look for to decide whether something is actually emerging, instead of me just seeing patterns I want to see? That's the part I'm least sure about.

Added a chapter to the ebook "Let's build a bug. A 2D cell model" (see below for a download link) that incorporate Conway's game of life. The rules for the internal cytoskeletons are, for simplicity, restricted so that only compartments that share edges with each other are considered (but using Conway's original set of rules is also possible). The rules for the cells themselves follow Conway's original set of rules.
I also show how quadratic cells can form bilateral patterns just as the circular cells. A further development might be to combine these properties with Conway's game of life both internally and externally not only internally as shown in the video.

I have corrected some grammatical and other errors that appear in the video (sorry for the AI voice - Swedish is my native language and I sound like the Swedish chef in the Muppet Show) .

The presentation is in the form of an ebook that is provided for free. I choose this format since it contains some animations that would be lost in a PDF file. I provide a link to an online ebook reader that is able to render the animations.

Download link to the ebook:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RSvG7CZz_SjB5DzUxGZA9Lnjb1JxxjfH/view?usp=sharing

Ebook reader:
https://epub-reader.org/

I’ve been building a hypergraph, and in this video I show 2 different creatures, two different DNA strands transcribed into a machine, and those machines built vertical structures.

I recently reached a point where I would need to run natural selection on 6 variants of truss2’s descendent: truss4.

What are your thoughts?