An Evolvable Artificial Chemistry Featuring Continuous Physics and Discrete Reactions

This paper describes an artificial chemistry featuring atoms and molecules moving and colliding in a continuous manner in a viscous fluid filling a 2D cellular space. Chemical reactions are mappings of discrete cellular configurations to parameterized actions on atoms. Actions allow atom creation and destruction, bonding and unbonding to make and break molecules, orientation, type change, and propulsion. Actions are easily added in this extensible model. An example involving a complex “foraging” reaction is provided as a demonstration of the capabilities of the framework. The reaction rules can be evolved by a genetic algorithm to exhibit a desired set of reactions. A portion of the foraging reaction was evolved to demonstrate this.