Biogenesis similates the evolutionary processes that happen on populations of unicellular organisms. The bacterial processes have been simplified to make them visually comprehensible. Although not scientifically exact, regular bacterial mechanisms can be observed including respiration, mutation, evolution and photosynthesis. It is also good entertainment.

Brain Sim is a 3-D virtual reality simulator in which user designed brains based upon realistic spiking neurons are inserted into virtual sea slugs for testing. Videos can be found by clicking the image. This environment has full soft body physics enabled. The goal is to follow the course of evolution in designing ever more complex brains to handle ever more complex and realistic environments. Written by David Olmsted, who is also interested in frog brains

Core War is a game played between two or more computer programs in the memory of a virtual computer. Core War programs are written in an assembly language called Redcode and the original instruction set had 8 instructions. Introduced to the world in 1984 by A.K.Dewdney in his Computer Recreations column in Scientific American, Core War maintains an active community of battlers today. Core War directly inspired Tierra.

Critterding is a petri dish simulator. Through the processes of natural selection and mutation, critters evolve from helpless and immobile organisms to more capable and intelligent forms. The parameters of brain and body evolution can be customized to create bizarre and novel critters. Critterding is an open source simulation in the style of Polyworld written by Bob Winklemans.

Eric Burden developed this fork from Critterding which introduced food which directly effects the critters' neurotransmitters. An extra retina shared by the whole community allows for the creation of artificial stimulant inspired art and experiments in telepathic communication.

A further fork by SEH expanding Critterding into a laboratory environment where users can build bodies directly. Also imagines alife operating systems where critters embody software processes in a peer to peer boundaryless network.

Darwin at Home is an open source software project that aims to bring the process of evolution into your computer at home so that you can see it working. Users design virtual muscular geometric structures which are challenged with achieving locomotion. Natural selection techniques can be emploted to refine their behavior.

Darwinbots is an Artificial Life simulator that merges the gameplay of C-Robots type arena combat with adaptive asexual population dynamics. Bots are simulated by a DNA script which defines behavior, reads various sensory inputs and connects them to various outputs and actions. Bot DNA files are in ascii with a .txt extension, which allows anyone familiar with the DNA language to write and share DNA files with notepad.

Darwin Pond is an imaginary gene pool, a primordial puddle of genetic surprises. Hundreds of physically-based organisms achieve locomotion via genetically-based motor control and morphology. You can set up experiments in artificial life simulation and watch evolution change anatomies and motions over many generations.

The EvoGrid is a worldwide, cross-disciplinary effort to create an abstract, yet plausible simulation of the chemical origins of life on Earth. One could think of this as an artificial origin of life experiment. Evogrid examines possible chemical soup combination's looking for a pathway from non-organic molecules to precursors of biological molecules (such as peptides, lipids, and amino acids).

Framsticks is a three-dimensional life simulation project. Both mechanical structures ("bodies") and control systems ("brains") of creatures are modeled. It is possible to design various kinds of experiments, including simple optimization (by evolutionary algorithms), coevolution, open-ended and spontaneous evolution, distinct gene pools and populations, diverse genotype-phenotype mappings, and modeling of species and ecosystems.

GenePool extends the simulation in Darwin Pond by emphasizing the effects of sexual selection on morphology and behavior. The term “swimbot” was chosen to describe the organisms in GenePool, because of their robot-like mechanical appearance and the fact that they evolve into virtual swimming machines. GenePool, Darwin Pond and many other alife programs were written by Jeffrey Ventrella

Noble Ape features a number of autonomous simulation components including a landscape simulation, biological simulation, weather simulation, sentient creature (Noble Ape) simulation and a simple intelligent-agent scripting language (ApeScript).

Soda present several creative toys which allow users to build their own marvelous things. Soda Constructor uses a spring based system and enables the generation of creatures with suprisingly lifelike motion. These can be evolved to compete against each other in SodaRace.

Tetragotchi is a multi-player online game where you can create, control, and evolve your own personal Tetragotchi, a virtual muscular body made of tetrahedron shapes which lives on even when you are not online. They exist on a single spherical world which they all share, so your Tetragotchi is not alone. Tetragotchi is an online development from the ideas in Darwin@Home, both written by Gerald de Jong.

EVOLUTIONARY ART AND MUSIC

A selection of practising artists who use Artificial Life methods.

Scott Draves is a visual and software artist living in New York City. He is best known as the creator of the Electric Sheep - collaborative artificial life software that recreates the biological phenomena of evolution and reproduction though mathematics. The system is made up of man and machine, a cyborg mind with 350,000 participant computers and people all over the Internet.

The Amsterdam based artist couple Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen have worked together since 1990 developing software, machines and objects. Their research focuses on the possibilities that physical, chemical and computer algorithms can offer for the development of image generating processes. Breed (pictured) uses Artificial Evolution to generate detailed sculptures and is rendered using rapid prototyping.

Galanter teaches generative art and physical computing at Texas A&M University. His artistic work includes generative hardware systems of his own design, installations, digital fine art prints, and light-box transparencies. He curated COMPLEXITY, the first major fine art exhibition focusing on complex systems and emergence in 2002. He has also written several papers on computational creativity including the provocative "The Problem with Evolutionary Art Is..." (2010)

Jon McCormack is an Australian-based electronic media artist and researcher. His research interests include generative evolutionary systems, computational creativity, machine learning, L-systems and developmental models. McCormack has shown around the world including Eden (pictured) - an evolutionary sonic ecosystem. His works are described in the monograph Impossible Nature: the art of Jon McCormack (2005).

Karl Sims is a digital media artist, computer graphics research scientist, and software entrepreneur. He is the founder of GenArts which creates special effects software for the motion picture industry. He previously held positions at Thinking Machines Corporation, Optomystic, and Whitney/Demos Productions where he pioneered evolutionary methods of breeding images, animations and even battling block creatures.