Self-Reproduction and Evolution in Cellular Automata: 25 Years After Evoloops

The year 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of evoloops, an evolutionary variant of Chris Langton’s self-reproducing loops, which proved constructively that Darwinian evolution of self-reproducing organisms by variation and natural selection is possible within deterministic cellular automata. Over the last few decades, this line of Artificial Life research has since undergone several important developments. Although it experienced a relative dormancy of activity for a while, the recent rise of interest in open-ended evolution and the success of continuous cellular automata models have brought researchers’ attention back to how to make spatiotemporal patterns self-reproduce and evolve within spatially distributed computational media. This article provides a review of the relevant literature on this topic over the past 25 years and highlights the major accomplishments made so far, the challenges being faced, and promising future research directions.