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I think many artificial life simulations end up underwhelming because life is incredibly complex, and so it's very hard to simulate at scale. This ALiEn is perhaps the most advanced one I've seen, and it looks like even still they take some shortcuts (like copypasting interesting organisms from previous simulations together to create interesting interactions).

What you see as a criticism of this line of research I think is actually its reason: Life is arguably the most interesting thing in the universe, and if we can create it digitally it will surprise us. Evolution yields insights and solutions that you cannot predict. If we can synthesize what the minimal set of key properties are necessary for artificial lifeforms to create interesting unexpected outcomes, it helps us clarify the definition of what a non-biological organism could be.

I'm personally fascinated by the idea of autonomous digital agents that exist and self replicate while trying to earn cryptocurrency, which is used to pay for the hosting costs of themselves and their progeny. I think we are about two decades away from this being realized, but in the future, software services could self assemble, replicate imperfectly and evolve to please humans without any humans writing additional code: we'd just have to code a profitable LUCA, create suitable 'nests' and pay the organisms that please us. "What is life" is debatable, but IMO this would be a valid digital lifeform.

> so it's very hard to simulate at scale.

But, this is a very unaddressed point. Why focus on "simulation" when mathematical formalisms & theories could be potentially even more useful? Especially when most "simulations" are running on some arbitrary set of hard-coded assumptions?

> What you see as a criticism of this line of research

To clarify, I was in no way criticizing ALife research. Quite the opposite. I am actually trying to help ensure it does not get stuck in a rut.

Ah. We'll speaking personally, mathematical formalisms & theories sound very intimidating, whereas CA-type simulations are so approachable many are 'fun toys' that kids can enjoy playing with.

A mathematically formal approach does sound potentially more useful, but I'd have no idea how to approach that sort of problem. I speculate that the venn diagram of people who want to work on these types of problems and also have the depth of formal math understanding to actually achieve it is a small handful of people who have plenty of other interesting problems to work on.

Or maybe someone has done this work successfully, but the depth of knowledge required to understand it has prevented wider awareness?

> Could someone explain the obsessive devotion to doing all Artificial "Life" research in terms of Cellular Automata?

Uh, it doesn't exist. Plenty of A-life research doesn't use cellular automata as a model.

> Also, if anyone knows of alternative methods to CA in studying the properties of life then I would also be interested in learning of these.

https://avida.devosoft.org/

> https://avida.devosoft.org/

Thanks for the link!

> Plenty of A-life research doesn't use cellular automata as a model.

While I would like to believe you on that, one link does not seem sufficient to support the word "plenty" when the ratio of ALife projects built around CAs to not is extremely high.

I'll at least point to another example: http://aevol.fr/

Although they could call this an automata, I think it's incorrect to call it a CA as it's not cell-neighbourhood based:

"A cellular automaton consists of a regular grid of cells, each in one of a finite number of states, such as on and off "

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton?wprov=sfla1

It's not grid based. But that seems like a rather pedantic differentiation to make. It does quite literally utilize the concept of "cells". [0]

I find it interesting that the project seems to have hard-coded emergence with the concept of "tokens".

So, I am much less intrigued by the simulation examples when most of what we are seeing is just a procedurally-generated video game with pre-defined game rules. Much of it is not truly emergent.

Again, it's a "oh, that's cool" kind of factor, but a far cry from contributing to anything in the way of "artificial life" research.

[0] https://alien-project.org/documentation/Basicnotion.html