Artificial Life

The study of ALife incorporates a wide collection of fields including self-organization, emergence, group behavior, cellular automaton, chaos, and evolution. However, from its beginning, the discipline of ALife has dealt with concepts and issues that are of interest to a much wider audience than just scientific researchers. Software developed for investigating various aspects of this field has often achieved wide spread popularity. The “Game of Life” for example enjoys a huge popularity on the Internet, and continues to fascinate and entertain both scientists and non-scientists. In particular, many of the concepts investigated in this field are of direct relevance to the entertainment and computer game industry such as simulating group motion and behavior, developing realistic adaptive opponents, and creating adaptive environments.
The ALife system used by Evolutionz is driven by the fact that intelligence and increased complexity emerged among terrestrial organisms as a function of open evolution in natural ecosystems; Therefore simulating and studying this process on a computer is a worthwhile exercise that has the potential of producing interesting results. We intend for Evolutionz to be a fun and accessible tool for investigating artificial ecosystems under open evolution.

To learn more about ALife, ALife research and more ALife software check out a few of the following sites:

PolyWorld: http://homepage.mac.com/larryy/larryy/PolyWorld.html

FramSticks: http://www.frams.alife.pl/

International Society of Artificial Life: http://www.alife.org

The Digital Biology Project: http://www.biota.org/

Karl Sims: http://www.genarts.com/karl/

Boids: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

Avida: http://dllab.caltech.edu/avida/