Lenia - Artificial Life from Algorithms

I quite like to mess about with systems called "Cellular Automata", so I wanted to share a Rust library I have been working on to simulate the Lenia system. And on the way, I also describe the steps it took to get to Lenia, as well as how the Conway's Game of Life, SmoothLife and Lenia cellular automata work in a quick way.

I, unfortunately have misled you in the video just a tiny bit... Namely, Already the SmoothLife system of cellular automata technically introduced the "integration step"... indeed, it would be impossible to simulate some of the shown SmoothLife systems without the integration step part. Some would perhaps even say that SmoothLife is more powerful and more general and a more faithful generalization of Conway's Game of Life than Lenia. And, well, if we allow for all of the experimentation and little upgrades that people have made over time to SmoothLife, then it ends up not being dissimilar from Lenia in general indeed.

This will most likely not be the last video about Lenia you will see from this channel, for I have some upgrades in mind for the Lenia system myself... ones that should allow Lenia to truly be the most general type of Life-Like system of cellular automata. As well as something that should make it more... "physics-like", shall we say. But when will I get to all that, only time will tell.


=|Links|=
lenia_ca crate github: https://github.com/BirdbrainEngineer/... - this one also has badly drawn images of the Lenia algorithms, which could make the algorithm more clear.
lenia_ca crate documentation: https://docs.rs/lenia_ca/0.1.0/lenia_ca/
Project code: https://github.com/BirdbrainEngineer/...
Online Basic Lenia (not mine): https://chakazul.github.io/Lenia/Java...
Lenia paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.05433
Expanded Lenia paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.03742
SmoothLife paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.1567
Asymptotic Lenia paper: https://direct.mit.edu/isal/proceedin...
Flow Lenia paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.07906 (Particle Lenia is based off this)
Particle Lenia Blog: https://google-research.github.io/sel...
Golly (program to simulate Life-like cellular automata): https://golly.sourceforge.net/
Infinite Life in Life: https://oimo.io/works/life/
Shadertoy SmoothLife simulation1: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XtdSDn
Shadertoy SmoothLife simulation2: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XtVXzV

=|Featured videos|=
   • Artificial Life uses Machine Learning...  
   • Asymptotic Lenia  
   • Particle Lenia  
   • The Incredible Story of The Game of Life  
   • Math's Fundamental Flaw  
   • Coding Challenge #85: The Game of Life  
   • Neat AI Does Conways AI Life  - Allow...  
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=|Music|=
Creative Commons CC-BY
744 Music - "untitled" (0.00 - 1.41 & 8.45 - 10.56)

Ecco - Timeless Ocean:
Fredrik Häthén - "Ecco the Dolphin - Medusa Bay" (1.40 - 2.57)
Ruclefia - "Ecco The Tides of Time - Title Theme" (5.09 - 8.43 & 10.57 - 11.52)

Youtube Audio Library:
Wayne Jones - "Resolution" (2.58 - 5.07)

Pixabay:
Lexin_Music - "Interstellar Space" (11.58 - 13.15)


=|Chapters|=
0:00 - Conway's Game of Life
1:39 - SmoothLife
5:02 - Lenia
7:26 - The Spectacle of Lenia
8:42 - How Lenia works
10:55 - Why make Cellular automata
11:55 - Project code
12:51 - Outro