(c)2001-2003 Adam Ierymenko
Archis is a plugin-based artificial life simulator / evolutionary programming engine written in Java.
The original Archis homepage is still online here.
It's a bit old. I wrote it many years ago while I was in college to prototype ideas for translating concepts from biology to computer science. I didn't realize until I'd already gotten an earlier version of this up and running that I was duplicating or at least running alongside work like this:
This didn't end my fascination with evolutionary computation by any means. In fact, I was overjoyed to find such things and learn that I was not in fact nuts. :)
Later I wrote a much smaller program called nanopond in plain vanilla C with the goal of stripping away the complexity and revealing alife/EC systems of this sort in their purest form.
Since it's such old code, it's missing some modern Java idioms such as templates. But it still builds and runs just fine with Java 7, and boy does it run fast on today's machines! It's multithreaded, so I was able to run it on my quad-core here and get rather amazing performance.
I've put it online in the interest of putting up some of my more interesting old code on GitHub. Enjoy!
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To run Archis, just start the application and create a new simulation from the File menu. You can have more than one simulation going at once.
Archis simulates virtual Turing-complete organisms in a simulated environment. The characteristics of this environment are defined by plugins. Some plugins you might want to try right away are Landscape2D (imposes a 2D grid and lets you see the little buggers) and GenesisCondition (generates random genomes until one can self-replicate).
Some of the other conditions are reward functions, so plugging these in can let you experiment with training your bugs to do things like output Fibonacci sequences. There's a relatively simple Java interface that you could use to do more experiments if you wanted.
I might write more docs in the future if I get around to it. :)
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License: I'm releasing this code under the GNU General Public License version 3. I haven't gotten around to installing that license everywhere, but assume those are the terms if anyone wants to use this for something.