Hm, sounds like mathematician giving fancy biological-sounding names to some procedurally generated abstract art forms.
Frankly, I had hoped for more, given the title. There's some really cool work that has been done with digital artificial life that has real biological significance. For example, Richard Lenski's group at Michigan State University developed a platform called AVIDA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida) that has been used for evolutionary biology research. Slightly different, 2012 saw the publication of the first whole-cell computational model (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286741...). And in the past 30 years, computer simulations of ecosystems have slowly been gaining momentum and acceptance as a tool for addressing ecological questions that are very hard to study in real life (this happens to be the field I work in).
Lenia, on the other hand, is nothing more than an abstraction of Conway's Game of Life. A pretty mathematical pastime that is fun to play around with and gives you some interesting patterns - but nothing that merits the description "biology". The whole paper just reeks with misapplied terms: from "taxonomy" to "ecology" and even "physiology". (They don't have anything to do with their real counterparts.) In short, I fail to find any significance for our knowledge of life on earth, or any other life, for that matter.
My comment had nothing to do with the number of dimensions or whether the world is continuous or discrete. (AVIDA and many other biological models are both 2D and discrete.)
The two core characteristics of life are metabolism and reproduction. Metabolism requires some kind of input, a resource, that is somehow consumed or transformed as the organism grows or is active. Reproduction places an organism in a long line of descent, possibly with mutation and evolution, akin to what we like to call Life.
Sure, living organisms show (symmetrical) organisation - but that is because this morphological organisation enables metabolic functions and reproductions. The morphology does not arise because of some random mathematical rules, but because it fulfills a specific need. It is not an end in itself. This teleological perspective is completely lacking in cellular automata such as Lenia.
I'm not sure about that. You're right that there doesn't seem to have been much development going on in the last few years, but a quick Google Scholar search indicates that there are still papers being published with it.
I don't know if performance was ever much of a problem with AVIDA. It's a pretty light model, as far as I recall.
It is an intriguing system. I love the idea behind it and had good fun playing around with it back in secondary school. Also some interesting theoretical work that was done with it, biology-wise. Though of course, you always have to take model results with a big grain of salt (and have a careful think about what can and what can't be applied to Real Life).
I don't know if performance was ever much of a problem with AVIDA
What if interesting things only start happening when you run billions of organisms for billions of generations? Kinda like what's been happening in neural networks field since GPUs enabled training of huge models on huge datasets. Even small scale experiments, if you can run them 100 times faster, you can explore 100 times more configurations.
I also played with Avida a while back. It feels like the key people behind it just lost interest and moved on to other things, and there have been no others determined and talented enough to push it forward.
Frankly, I had hoped for more, given the title. There's some really cool work that has been done with digital artificial life that has real biological significance. For example, Richard Lenski's group at Michigan State University developed a platform called AVIDA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida) that has been used for evolutionary biology research. Slightly different, 2012 saw the publication of the first whole-cell computational model (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286741...). And in the past 30 years, computer simulations of ecosystems have slowly been gaining momentum and acceptance as a tool for addressing ecological questions that are very hard to study in real life (this happens to be the field I work in).
Lenia, on the other hand, is nothing more than an abstraction of Conway's Game of Life. A pretty mathematical pastime that is fun to play around with and gives you some interesting patterns - but nothing that merits the description "biology". The whole paper just reeks with misapplied terms: from "taxonomy" to "ecology" and even "physiology". (They don't have anything to do with their real counterparts.) In short, I fail to find any significance for our knowledge of life on earth, or any other life, for that matter.
Pretty graphs, though.