I've been working on Persistence, an artificial life simulation where agents are modelled as dissipative structures - they must constantly harvest energy and export entropy just to stay alive.

What makes it different from most ALife sims:

• Strict mass and energy conservation enforced at every step. A physics auditor runs periodically and flags any violation.

• No designed behaviors. Agents interact with chemical fields through their genome - intakes, excretions, toxin sensitivities. Everything you observe emerges from that.

• Metabolic activity generates waste heat that diffuses through the environment. Dense clusters cook themselves.

• When agents die, their biomass disperses as necromass into surrounding cells. Nothing is lost.

The result is that dynamics like boom-bust cycles, self-inhibiting populations, and emergent mutualism arise purely from the physics.

It's open source, comes with pre-configured scenarios to explore, and a full physics test suite to validate conservation laws.

GitHub | Happy to discuss the thermodynamic implementation in the comments.

Philosophy: Entropy always wins, but life still tries. That's worth celebrating.

Hey everyone,

I scan through all the articles from the artificial life journal and I'm a bit surprised by how few articles on self-reproducing systems, organism formation from cells, or life emergence that has been published in the last years. I mean software research like cellular automata, L-systems, or particle systems with life-like properties.

I feel like there were much more systems investigated in the early days (Langton loop, Evo loop, JohnnyVon, plant morphogenesis) than there are now. Do you feel the same? I just ran through this journal so maybe I need to check other ones? Alternatively, I see that there are many initiatives outside of academic papers like alien project or bibites. Should I look somewhere else to find projects like those?

Let me know!

Hi everyone!

I still wonder why it took me so long to post here! I've always loved artificial life and I've been recently been working on a video game called Nektonik that I would like to share with you. It is a virtual life simulation game but there is a lot more to it - you control a tiny organism and you follow its journey as a species. You evolve and customize its unique anatomy as you see fit, discover new organism types, breed them together and more! The organisms are fully procedural and their design drive the way they swim and behave.

Here is more information about the game if you are interested:

• Trailer

• Website

A free web-browser alpha demo is also available and I am looking for feedback/constructive criticism, be it positive or negative.

Nektonik - Playable Alpha (Unity Web Player)

The demo features eight fully playable levels (rounding 2 to 3 hours of play) and the gameplay mechanics are in place. The game also automatically saves your progress! Of course this is a work in progress and you will experience bugs and incomplete content...

This game is based on a life simulation project I wrote back in 1995 and called Beagle ( link ). Because I wanted to turn the simulator into an actual game, I had to remove a lot of the selection and evolution algorithms, but I'm planning to add some of them back in. For instance, all the other organisms in the game will evolve as well, all based on the 'selection' the player did while playing the game - this means that all the organisms that survive a level (not defeated by the player) will pass on their genes to the next generation, making the enemies adapt to the player's gameplay performance.

Thanks a lot for your help and interest :)

Hello everyone,

I would like to introduce you to a new Alife software on which I have been working as a hobby project during my academic and industrial career. On the one hand the simulation platform is based on a rather realistic physics engine and on the other hand it allows to program matter building blocks. The simulation software uses distributed algorithms implemented entirely in CUDA and therefore run quite fast on a GPU.

In first experiments I was able to design replicators and simulate effects of evolutionary adaptations. I'm very curious about your opinions and suggestions for improvement. :-)

The source code is available on GitHub. For your convenience you can also find an installer for Windows binaries on the website below (Nvidia graphics card is required).

I'm looking forward to your feedback or ideas how to use the software and make it better known to the Alife community.

... and here you can find the website with the installer and with many illustrations and videos:

alien-project.org

Inspired by David Attenborough's First Life I created an evolution simulator, where I try to simulate life from single celled lifeforms living near deep sea vents to the first multicellular species.

YouTube video - https://youtu.be/vHb07ynsPgo

Steam - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2102770/EvoLife/