Self-protection maintains diversity of artificial self-replicators evolving in cellular automata

The concept of "self-protection", a capability of an organism to protect itself from exogenous attacks, is introduced to the design of artificial evolutionary systems as a possible method to create and maintain diversity in the population. Three different mechanisms of self-protection are considered and implemented on a cellular automata based evolutionary system, the evoloop. Simulation results imply a positive effect of those mechanisms on diversity maintenance, especially when the self-protection is moderate so that it conserves both the attacker and the attacked.