Biomaker CA: a Biome Maker project using Cellular Automata

TL;DR

Biomaker CA is a GPU-accelerated cellular automata framework for simulating evolving biomes, enabling complex morphogenesis, meta-evolution, and interactive evolution in diverse environments.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, GPU-based cellular automata platform for modeling and evolving complex biomes with various environmental laws and mutation strategies.

Findings

Plants can grow, survive, and reproduce in simulated biomes.

Meta-evolution techniques improve model robustness in harsh environments.

Interactive evolution allows user-guided development of plant models.

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 .