“From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
On the Origin of Species, C. Darwin
As old as artificial intelligence itself, the philosophical and computational inquiry concerning the conditions for emergence of complex, life-like behavior has always been a mistery. Artificial life is an interdisciplinary field that uses computational models to investigate the principles underlying evolving living systems. At AIRLab, we develop simulations that replicate the structural architecture and functional dynamics of biological cells and multicellular assemblies, enabling us to study virtual agents in rich, evolving environments. These experiments allow us to chart the evolutionary trajectories that produce emergent behaviors—complex, system-level phenomena that cannot be predicted by examining individual components alone. On a broader level, our goal is to investigate the phenomenon of emergence, which describes the spontaneous formation of coordinated, higher-order functions from the collective interactions of simpler parts.Â