What is Pseudolife?

Pseudolife is a simulation of evolving pseudolife forms.

These pseudolife forms, also called cells, start out as roughly circular blobs defined by 12 spokes of different lengths and angles. Cells move by hopping a constant distance at a constant frequency. To survive, they need to gather food, which is regularly spawned by the environment. Their sight is limited to a small area (indicated by the black circle) so they move randomly until they see food. Food is stored in a cell's gut, whose size is proportional to their mass, and is slowly converted into energy. Once the gut is full, the cell stops moving and only continues to move when it reaches a hunger threshold.

Energy is used by the cell for its several actions, such as movement. A cell's current energy level is indicated by its color, with green being high and red being low. When a cell's energy is depleted, they die and turn into food for other cells. However, once it reaches a maximum energy threshold, it produces an offspring (indicated by a green line), whose traits are inherited from its parent (indicated by a red line) but slightly mutated. Thus, cells would evolve over time to adapt to their environment.

The current layout of the environment is divided into four regions, each with different food spawning behavior. These regions are separated by a wall which cells cannot cross. However, if they're close enough to a wall, they can spawn an offspring on the other side, allowing their offspring to colonize the new region. The left regions spawn food every minute (season) while the right regions spawn food every 30 seconds. However, the number of food spawned differs with the upper regions spawning 15 each and the lower regions spawning 30 each. A food particle lasts for only 15 minutes (seasons) so there is a maximum amount of food an uncolonized region can have.

There is currently no goal in Pseudolife. I started the project expecting to see emergent behavior from simple rules. I have yet to add features allowing for more complex behavior but at its current state, the simulation still produces interesting results (e.g. divergent evolution, species invasion, etc.). The project is still in development, so expect to see more features in the future.