shpralex

Thanks! I hadn't realized but Tierra and Avida are quite similar to SproutLife. I found this video that explains a bit about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouF8wKxXWFQ&t=1050s

I wonder if they also encountered the issue where the genomes/programs get simpler over time. In some ways one would expect evolution to increase complexity, but what I found happening is that prioritizing reproduction means creating pressure to decrease complexity, thereby increasing the reproduction rate and decreasing the footprint for negative mutations. The way SproutLife counteracted this was to add a "competitive" metric where bigger organism win over smaller ones, kind of like big trees casting shade to block smaller shrubs.

That's the thing. Fitness is an unknown that can only be evaluated through competition/survival. There is a function that compares organism size (the number of cells) and bigger organisms win collisions. But just because being bigger has an advantage, doesn't mean that size is the only determining factor. Organisms can move/reproduce in such a way that they end up colliding with their direct relatives, so like parents killing children. That is obviously not good for collective survival. On the other hand smaller organisms may be more organized, so the damage they inflict adds to self-inflicted damage by the bigger organisms, so the smaller ones end up winning.

Thank you for the links. The closest I've seen to what I'm doing with SproutLife is an iteration of Langton's loops which were developed in 1984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton%27s_loops#:~:text=Lang....

Here is a video where these loops compete - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGRPwuVvErs&list=LL&index=14...

SproutLife is a passion project for me. I would like to give attention to previous works, and more importantly highlight some kind of practical benefits that studying alife has. We are surrounded by living evolving structures, and having a better mathematical concept of this can be pretty useful which is essentially what alife give us.

Hi! I'm the creator of SproutLife. I've been planning to do an official announcement of the recent developments, and to update the writeup as well.

I recommend checking out the gallery, and working off the latest source https://github.com/ShprAlex/SproutLife/tree/master/gallery

As far as "evolving towards what", here are my thoughts on the subject:

The inspiration for SproutLife was to create an open ended genome with unlimited potential for evolution.

The initial success was that this was possible.

Anticlimactically, it turns out that an open ended genome in a turing complete environment does not lead to some kind of transcendent evolutionary product. The solutions that emerge are still limited by the simple problems they are tasked with.

It is the evolutionary journey, rather than a specific destination where SproutLife can be most informative. It can be used to study the role that disruption plays as a threat to stability and a necessity for progress.

In particular, the process of "collapse" is an interesting topic for investigation. From Covid to the popping of stock market bubbles, political upheaval, and even global warming, we are surrounded by real and potential falling of the established order. SproutLife also exhibits this kind of behavior and can let us understand how to quantify and perhaps predict it.