用进化算法让神经元自动演化出类生命形态,持续生成复杂新现象。
Evolving Many Worlds: Towards Open-Ended Discovery in Petri Dish NCA via Population-Based Training

- 通过多代演化优化神经细胞自动机,奖励行为新颖性和视觉多样性。
- 长期运行下自发产生周期波、孢子扩散和可变形迁移结构等生命特征。
- 适合对自组织系统、生成艺术和人工生命感兴趣的读者。
从局部交互中生成持续且开放的复杂性,仍是人工生命领域的核心挑战。如Petri Dish神经细胞自动机(PD-NCA)这类可微分多智能体系统,虽能通过空间竞争驱动丰富自组织,但对超参数敏感,常坍缩为冻结平衡或无结构噪声。本文提出PBT-NCA,一种元进化算法,对一群PD-NCA施加复合目标:同时奖励历史行为新颖性与当前视觉多样性。在持续进化压力下,PBT-NCA在长时间尺度上自发生成大量涌现的生命样现象——真正开放性的标志。我们观察到高度规则的协同周期波;类似孢子的散射机制,即均匀群体向外抛射细胞簇以占领远端区域;以及流态可变的宏观结构,可在基底上迁移并维持稳定外边界,内部高度活跃。通过主动惩罚单一文化与死寂状态,PBT-NCA持续维持介于全局有序与全局随机之间的有效复杂度,始终处于‘混沌边缘’。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The generation of sustained, open-ended complexity from local interactions remains a fundamental challenge in artificial life. Differentiable multi-agent systems, such as Petri Dish Neural Cellular Automata (PD-NCA), exhibit rich self-organization driven purely by spatial competition; however, they are highly sensitive to hyperparameters and frequently collapse into uninteresting patterns and dynamics, such as frozen equilibria or structureless noise. In this paper, we introduce PBT-NCA, a meta-evolutionary algorithm that evolves a population of PD-NCAs subject to a composite objective that rewards both historical behavioral novelty and contemporary visual diversity. Driven by this continuous evolutionary pressure, PBT-NCA spontaneously generates a plethora of emergent lifelike phenomena over extended horizons-a hallmark of true open-endedness. Strikingly, the substrate autonomously discovers diverse morphological survival and self-organization strategies. We observe highly regular, coordinated periodic waves; spore-like scattering where homogeneous groups eject cell-like clusters to colonize distant territories; and fluid, shape-shifting macro-structures that migrate across the substrate, maintaining stable outer boundaries that enclose highly active interiors. By actively penalizing monocultures and dead states, PBT-NCA sustains a state of effective complexity that is neither globally ordered nor globally random, operating persistently at the "edge of chaos".
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