q-bio.PEMar 2, 2026

A speciation simulation that partly passes open-endedness tests

Authors: Théo de Pinho, Lana Sinapayen

Organizations: University of Lille, France · Sony Computer Science Laboratories / National Institute for Basic Biology, Japan

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Abstract

One of the main goals of artificial life research is to recreate in artificial systems the trends for ever more complex and novel entities, interactions and processes that we see in Earth's biosphere, that is, to create open-ended systems. In this paper, we test for Tokyo type 1 open-ended evolution (OEE) of the Tree of Life Simulation (ToLSim), an artificial life software created by Lana Sinapayen. To do so, we conducted an experiment to measure evolutionary activity statistics. These require us to define the notion of components. Here, we define components as the agent's genes. The results show that ToLSim is capable of exhibiting unbounded total cumulative evolutionary activity. However, total and median normalized cumulative evolutionary activity appear bounded and new evolutionary activity is persistently null, suggesting that ToLSim is not open-ended. Further studies on ToLSim could repeat this experiment with individuals or even species, rather than genes, to test whether the present results are valid.

Figures & tables

Figure 1: Screenshots of a run of ToLSim at different times. (a) shows ToLSim before the apparition of ALife (the black squares are the sources of energy). (b) shows ToLSim just after ALife has appeared and spread (the additional squares are agents). (c) and (d) shows ToLSim several minutes after that. (d) shows a species spreading.
Figure 2: A tree representing a run of ToLSim. Each dot represents an individual. Individuals are plotted according to the moment of their birth ( created ), their maximum energy ( maxEnergy ) and their maximum or “programmed” death ( pgmDeath ). Branches are visible, highlighting the emergence of different “species”.
Figure 3: Total cumulative activity curves of runs n°1, n°12 and n°20, each illustrating a typical profile found across the 20 runs.
Figure 4: Total normalized cumulative activity, median normalized cumulative activity and new activity of run n°1. This run is representative of all runs.
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