Artificial life: resources & links

These are some projects & articles related to that I have found interesting. I intend to update it as I find more. I hope this list can be valuable to anyone interested in learning more about artificial life.

Projects

Year Name Description
1984 Langton's Loops Cellular automaton with a simple loop-shaped replicator. Often adapted.
Wikipedia
1984 Core War Game involving interacting programs, often self-replicating ones.
Wikipedia
1991 Tierra Studying evolution using programs living in linear memory.
Wikipedia
YouTube: Project Tierra
Source code
1993 Avida Inspired by Tierra, studies evolution of programs living in linear memory.
Wikipedia
2015 Lenia Cellular automaton with continuous cell values.
Home page
Source code
2016 SALIS Inspired by Tierra, studies evolution of programs living in linear memory.
YouTube channel with videos explaining the simulation
2016* Alien Particle simulation in continuous space.
* May have been around since 2008 or earlier?
Home page
Source code
2019 Myco Inspired by SALIS, studies evolution of programs living in 2D memory.
YouTube: Myco: An Artificial Life Experiment
Source code
2020 Broth Particle simulation in continuous space, with behavior governed by internal programs within control particles.
Introduction
Source code

Inspiration

Sources of inspiration for artificial life, and more generally, the study of biology from a computational perspective:

Year Link
2017 DNA: Bert Hubert
2017 Open-endedness: The last grand challenge you've never heard of by James Somers
2020 YouTube: I Grew Real Spider Silk Using Yeast (hand-coding DNA)
2020 Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
2020 "I should have loved biology" by James Somers

Videos

Articles

Year Link
1994 Evolution, Complexity, Entropy, and Artificial Reality
2002 Open-Ended Artifical Evolution
2004 A Functional Self-Reproducing Cell in a Two-Dimensional Artificial Chemistry
2004 Redrawing the Boundary between Organism and Environment
2006 Spatial-Pattern-Induced Evolution of a Self-Replicating Loop Network
2007 Evolvable Self-Reproducing Cells in a Two-Dimensional Artificial Chemistry
2011 The Meta-Morphogenesis Project
2012 Energy-based Artificial Chemistry Simulator
<2015 Chemlambda
2014 Evolution in Virtual Worlds
2018 Seeking Open-Ended Evolution in Swarm Chemistry II: Analyzing Long-Term Dynamics via Automated Object Harvesting
2018 Cardinality Leap for Open-Ended Evolution: Theoretical Considerations and Demonstration by "Hash Chemistry"
2021 Increased Complexity and Fitness of Artificial Cells that Reproduce Using Spatially Distributed Asynchronous Parallel Processes
2021 Species could have formed prior to the origin of life (archive.org link)

More Resources