Regensburg 2025 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 26: Synthetic life-like systems and Origins of Life

BP 26.4: Talk

Thursday, March 20, 2025, 10:15–10:30, H46

Continuous Evolving Game of Life with Diversity — •Alexandre Guillet and Frank Jülicher — MPI-PKS, Dresden, Germany

The complex phenomenology of J. Conway's ``Game of Life'' cellular automaton, in particular its gliders, has been translated into continuous fields in space and time in a 2011 preprint by S. Rafler. The striking organic feel associated with these artificial life simulations in isotropic space has attracted the attention of a growing online community at the intersection of citizen science and computer art, which has recently culminated in the exploration and classification of the diverse morphologies of the ``Lenia'' gliders by BWC. Chan and others.

Our research focuses on a minimal variant of these continuous nonlinear dynamical systems that is capable of generating gliding, self-replicating and vanishing patterns, with striking resemblance to cell division, motility and death. Elaborating upon the governing partial integro-differential equation, we allow each cell to carry individual variations of the parameters, thus introducing a spatial diversity of rules. A conservation law is enforced on the resources of the cells as a selection pressure, together with a mutation process as a random source of diversity. The spontaneous evolution of the system from a single cell leads to a rich phenomenology, ranging from mycelial growth to epithelia and amoeboid motion.

This continuous and evolving model with diversity raises the Game of Life into a toy model for the morphogenesis and evolution of primordial lifeforms.

Keywords: continuous cellular automaton; morphogenesis; self-replication; evolution; reaction-diffusion