Coralai: Intrinsic Evolution of Embodied Neural Cellular Automata Ecosystems

June 14, 2024 · Entered Twilight · 🏛 The 2024 Conference on Artificial Life

Repo contents: .gitignore, .gitmodules, README.md, archive, coral_runner.py, coral_runner_neat.py, coral_runner_old.py, coral_runner_space.py, coralai, examples, imgui.ini, minimal_runner.py, nca_runner.py, setup.py, test.py, xor_runner.py

Authors Aidan Barbieux, Rodrigo Canaan arXiv ID 2406.09654 Category cs.NE: Neural & Evolutionary Cross-listed cs.LG, cs.MA Citations 0 Venue The 2024 Conference on Artificial Life Repository https://github.com/aidanbx/coralai ⭐ 17 Last Checked 4 months ago

Abstract

This paper presents Coralai, a framework for exploring diverse ecosystems of Neural Cellular Automata (NCA). Organisms in Coralai utilize modular, GPU-accelerated Taichi kernels to interact, enact environmental changes, and evolve through local survival, merging, and mutation operations implemented with HyperNEAT and PyTorch. We provide an exploratory experiment implementing physics inspired by slime mold behavior showcasing the emergence of competition between sessile and mobile organisms, cycles of resource depletion and recovery, and symbiosis between diverse organisms. We conclude by outlining future work to discover simulation parameters through measures of multi-scale complexity and diversity. Code for Coralai is available at https://github.com/aidanbx/coralai , video demos are available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL8IZQY02-8 .