Creating New Artificial Life

Abstract

Artificial life is the simulation of life or life processes. There are many kinds of artificial life programs available, but none that were exactly what I was looking for, so I decided to program my own. Using Python, I wrote a simulation that contains agents, which have neural networks as their brains and can learn, as well as genetics that define the neural networks. They also have needs such as hunger and can starve to death. The program shows a visualization of the agents and their environment, and it can also show their brain structure and live activity. It can save the network structure of any particular agent to a text file and later read it back in, making it suitable for running experiments. These agents are simple, but the program is an expandable platform for artificial life experiments, with little that is hardcoded. The code is freely provided so that anyone can both look at the code and modify it for their own interests.