Biomaker CA: a Biome Maker project using Cellular Automata
Authors: name: Ettore Randazzo; name: Alexander Mordvintsev
Published: 2023-07-18 15:03:40

Abstract: We introduce Biomaker CA: a Biome Maker project using Cellular Automata (CA).
In Biomaker CA, morphogenesis is a first class citizen and small seeds need to
grow into plant-like organisms to survive in a nutrient starved environment and
eventually reproduce with variation so that a biome survives for long
timelines. We simulate complex biomes by means of CA rules in 2D grids and
parallelize all of its computation on GPUs through the Python JAX framework. We
show how this project allows for several different kinds of environments and
laws of 'physics', alongside different model architectures and mutation
strategies. We further analyze some configurations to show how plant agents can
grow, survive, reproduce, and evolve, forming stable and unstable biomes. We
then demonstrate how one can meta-evolve models to survive in a harsh
environment either through end-to-end meta-evolution or by a more surgical and
efficient approach, called Petri dish meta-evolution. Finally, we show how to
perform interactive evolution, where the user decides how to evolve a plant
model interactively and then deploys it in a larger environment. We open source
Biomaker CA at: https://tinyurl.com/2x8yu34s .