Self-Replicating Neural Cellular Automata: Quantifying Emergent Phenotypic and Genotypic Diversity in an Open-Ended Substrate
We study an in silico substrate in which every pixel of a two-channel cellular-automata grid carries a tiny neural network (an agent) that senses its Moore neighbourhood. A cell persists only by self-replication: a living neighbour is cloned, and its weights are mutated by a uniform perturbation, so that phenotype (cel...