Non-Platonic Autopoiesis of a Cellular Automaton Glider in Asymptotic Lenia

TL;DR

This paper investigates the autopoietic behavior of a Lenia cellular automaton glider, revealing that its self-organizing properties depend on simulation resolution and exhibit fractal boundary details.

Contribution

It demonstrates that Lenia gliders' autopoietic properties are sensitive to simulation parameters and exhibit fractal boundary structures, expanding understanding of non-Platonic autopoiesis.

Findings

Glider autopoiesis depends on simulation coarseness.

Fractal boundary details persist down to floating point precision.

Autopoietic behavior can be lost at fine resolutions.

Abstract

Like Life, Lenia CA support a range of patterns that move, interact with their environment, and/or are modified by said interactions. These patterns maintain a cohesive, self-organizing morphology, i.e. they exemplify autopoiesis, the self-organization principle of a network of components and processes maintaining themselves. Recent work implementing Asymptotic Lenia as a reaction-diffusion system reported that non-Platonic behavior in standard Lenia may depend on the clipping function, and that ALenia gliders are likely not subject to non-Platonic instability. In this work I show an example of a glider in ALenia that depends on a certain simulation coarseness for autopoietic competence: when simulated with too fine spatial or temporal resolution the glider no longer maintains its morphology or dynamics. I also show that instability maps of the asymptotic Lenia glider, and others in different CA framworks, show fractal retention of fine boundary detail down to the limit of floating point precision.