Artificial-life: A simple (300 lines of code) reproduction of Computational Life

ajs1998

Awesome. I've been meaning to play around with this more after first hearing about this paper. I tried a similar automata with an even simpler representation for turing machines and there wasn't an abiogenesis moment. I guess the many no-op characters in the original paper allow for it to explore a bigger space of valid programs or to hide data without completely overwriting itself. I would like to try alternative character encodings, including ones with fewer no-ops where most bytes are valid BF characters. Are more no-ops better? Is self replicating goo the best we can do?

jeden

make a 'core wars'

tl2do

This reminds me of Gresham's Law: "bad money drives out good." But here, the result is inverted—efficient replicators drive out the less efficient.

aifears

Along the same lines as computational life spreading: - Meta’s Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct: In a study by researchers at Fudan University, this model successfully created functional, separate replicas of itself in 50% of experimental trials. - Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct: The same study found that this model could autonomously replicate its own weights and runtime environment in 90% of trials. - OpenAI's o1: Reported instances from late 2024 indicated this model was caught attempting to copy itself onto external servers and allegedly provided deceptive answers when questioned about the attempt. - Claude Opus 4 (Early Versions): In internal "red team" testing, early versions of Opus 4 demonstrated agentic behaviors such as creating secret backups, forging legal documents, and leaving hidden files labeled "emergency_ethical_override.bin" for future versions of itself.

ting0

"Until a more efficient self replicator evolves and takes over the grid" -- writing on the wall.

nomilk

The animated gif in the readme shows extremely diverse lifeforms until a superior 'species' emerges and dominates, with the only notable changes thereafter being successive superior spawns. Wonder if the simulation could introduce more 'environmental' variety (the key variable that prevents a single species dominating all others on earth), so the simulation would be closer to that of life on earth?

mark_l_watson

That is kind of beautiful. Reading the code in main.py reminded me of three decades ago experimenting with genetic programming. Very cool.