Flow-Lenia: Towards open-ended evolution in cellular automata
8 days ago
- #cellular automata
- #artificial life
- #self-organization
- Flow-Lenia is an extension of Lenia, a family of cellular automata (CA), designed to support open-ended evolution through mass conservation and parameter localization.
- Lenia generalizes Conway's Game of Life to continuous space, time, and states, enabling diverse self-organizing patterns, including life-like artificial creatures.
- Spatially localized patterns (SLPs) in Lenia resemble artificial creatures but are limited to a small parameter subspace and require advanced search algorithms to discover.
- Flow-Lenia addresses these limitations by allowing SLPs to exist in worlds with different update rules, enabling interactions between diverse creatures.
- The paper demonstrates Flow-Lenia's effectiveness in generating SLPs with complex behaviors and optimizing update rule parameters for desired behaviors.
- Flow-Lenia integrates CA update rule parameters within the CA dynamics, making them dynamic and localized, facilitating multi-species simulations with locally coherent rules.
- This advancement paves the way for the intrinsic evolution of self-organized artificial life forms within continuous CAs.