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Polyworld is a computer simulation of Artificial Life that mirrors the ecological and anthropological development of real life. Entities demonstrate human actions and interactions, with survival strategies and brain architecture dictating their behavior. The environment is available on various platforms and supports parallel simulations to study evolutionary complexity.
Polyworld is the computer simulation of programmer Larry Yaegar’s Artificial Life (also known as Alife and Theoretical Biology), or computational ecology that seeks to mirror the ecological and anthropological development of real life. The environment in which the inhabitants of Polyworld operate is available for installation on a number of platforms (Mac OS X, Linux) and features a two-dimensional plane rendered using the QT graphics toolkit and OpenGL.
The entities that inhabit the Polyworld environment act in accordance with their underlying neural network and demonstrate the full range of human actions and interactions; that is, they can eat, drink, reproduce, fight, and kill each other. In short, simulated organisms either develop survival strategies and thrive or they don’t and die.
The behavior of the individual simulated organisms inhabiting Polyworld is dictated by each organism’s behavioral suite and the underlying neural network that serves as the organism’s brain. The behavioral suite is the name given to the organism’s ability to move, turn, attack, eat, mate, and light up. Neural network or brain architecture is the name given to the types and arrangements of neural clusters that make up the organism’s brain. These neural clusters consist of neurons that excite (excitatory neurons) or inhibit (inhibitory neurons) the entity and, in effect, dictate the personality and ultimately the survival of the various beings of the Polyworld.
The synaptic efficiency of the various entities of the Polyworld operate according to the laws of Hebbian learning. This allows a Polyworld entity, by repeatedly activating the same neurons, to develop and learn from its past experience by strengthening its neural connections and developing the neurological topography that has proven effective in promoting its well-being and survival in the past.
Both the organism’s physiology and its brain are encoded in its genetic makeup, and thus the Polyworld environment is populated and will continue to be populated by the various evolved generations of a particular original ancestor. This has meant that clans or species have evolved that display their species-specific behavior and survival strategies. These strategies have manifested themselves in a number of sophisticated traits of human behavior including flight, avoidance, foraging, swarming, and crowding.
Polyworld has also been updated to support parallel “guided” and “passive” simulations in an effort to discern the nature and existence of an evolutionary “arrow of complexity”.
