Automating the Search for Artificial Life with Foundation Models

ASAL uses vision-language foundation models to automatically search across ALife substrates for simulations that match prompts, sustain open-ended novelty, or maximize diversity, reducing manual trial-and-error. It discovers new Lenia and Boids life-forms and lifelike CAs with strong open-endedness, and leverages FM embeddings to quantify emergent behaviors in a substrate-agnostic way.