Heterogeneous Ca Dynamics Eval

heterogeneous-ca-dynamics-eval

Emergent Dynamics in Heterogeneous Life-Like Cellular Automata — Shrestha et al. (2024) (arXiv:2406.13383, 2024)

What this evaluates

Evaluates the long-term phenotypic and genotypic dynamics of a heterogeneous cellular automaton with age constraints and local evolution, testing its ability to sustain open-ended innovation without stagnation.

Datasets

• Heterogeneous Life-Like CA Simulation — total ?; splits: test (-1)

Metrics

• quantitative metrics (primary) — range: other
  • Averaged results over 10 independent runs, with standard deviation calculated. Specific measures (e.g., population count, diversity) are not explicitly named in the text.

Input / output format

Input: 2D grid (50x50 or 500x500). Initial state: 50% alive, 50% quiescent. All alive cells initialized with GoL genome (B3S23). Phenotypic states split 50/50 between 0 and 1. Age parameters: amax (10 or 50), adec (15 or 70).

Output: Simulation state evolution over generations. Final reported values are averaged quantitative metrics across 10 runs.

Scoring recipe

# Pseudo-code based on protocol
results = []
for run in range(10):
    grid = initialize_grid(size, alive_ratio=0.5)
    for gen in range(generations):
        grid = apply_ca_rules(grid, amax, adec, P_inh=0.125, P_mut=0.2)
    results.append(compute_quantitative_metrics(grid))
mean_val = sum(results) / len(results)
std_val = sqrt(sum((x - mean_val)**2 for x in results) / len(results))
return {"mean": mean_val, "std": std_val}

Common pitfalls

• Confusing the age-constrained GoL variant (P_mut=0.0, amax=50, adec=70) with the classical GoL baseline (no age limits, all cells initially alive).
• Using different grid sizes (50x50 for 10k steps vs 500x500 for 1k steps) without adjusting expectations for population dynamics.
• Forgetting that only 'Alive' cells can inherit genomes; decay/quiescent cells cannot reproduce.

Evidence (verbatim from paper)

The experiments are run on a 50 × 50 grid for 10,000 generations and on a 500 × 500 grid for 1,000 steps. The experiments were repeated 10 times and for the quantitative metrics, results were averaged and the deviation calculated.

Citation

@misc{shrestha2024emergent,
  title={Emergent Dynamics in Heterogeneous Life-Like Cellular Automata},
  author={Shrestha et al. (2024)},
  year={2024},
  note={arXiv:2406.13383}
}

• arXiv: 2406.13383