How the Life Engine works

The Life Engine world is a grid made up of square cells—everything is made of cells, which are the sort of atoms of the world, the building blocks of the environment and its organisms.

The Life Engine features six anatomy cell types that can only exist within an organism as part of its structure, each serving distinct functions.

The orange mouth cell is the most important cell type—it eats food in directly adjacent cells, and every organism needs a mouth since it’s the only cell that is absolutely essential.

Once an organism is born, a timer begins counting down until its eventual death when it is turned into food—the length of an organism’s lifespan is calculated by multiplying the number of cells it has by the simulation control parameter called lifespan multiplier.

The goal of an organism is to reproduce before it dies—once an organism has eaten as much food as it has cells in its body, it will attempt to reproduce.

Reproduction can fail if offspring attempt to occupy non-empty cells—this introduces entropy where resources can be forever lost, but also means that static producers are somewhat dependent on movers to clear away accumulated food from dead organisms.

Any organism can evolve eyes, but when an organism has both eyes and mover cells, it is given a brain that enables perception-based decision making.

Do organisms have genes? Functionally yes—information is being copied and pasted from parent to offspring, information that defines the makeup and behavior of that organism, so genes.

When born, offspring have a small chance to mutate their anatomies in three different ways, providing the variation necessary for evolution.

Among the traits that can mutate is the probability of mutation itself—called mutability—creating a meta-evolutionary dynamic where evolution can tune its own rate of change.

It doesn’t take any more rules or systems or code to build in the evolution itself—organisms that survive, eat food, and reproduce propagate throughout the environment, and those with more advantageous mutations or genes will propagate more.