Warning: investigating Artificial Life can be addictive! Once you start exploring artificial life you will become fascinated by the many different and beautiful ‘life’ forms that emerge from simple beginnings. You’ll spend hours tinkering with genetics and rules as you attempt to produce ‘better’ and more exciting creatures and other virtual life forms.
Artificial Life – where to start! There’s so much around – just a quick web search shows thousands of virtual worlds, simulating life.
In artificial life, we expect to see several elements combined: a simulated world, usually with some physical rules (eg gravity, energy as a limited resource, collisions); some sort of creatures which have behaviour (again governed by rules) that we can see changing over time; and the possibility of new creatures being generated or created, often by applying some sort of success criteria to the creatures. Set up the world, populate it with simple creatures, let them interact and maybe compete for limited resources (food, energy, mates), and watch them evolve!
Take a look at simple systems where you can easily see all the rules (but still give interesting & unpredictable behaviour), more complex 2D systems with genetics, and some 3D worlds too.
Some Sugarscape sites:
You can also explore Sugarscape in StarLogo - open the project C:\Program Files\StarLogo\Sample Projects\Social Systems\sugarscape.slogo
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