ALIEN
Artificial Life Environment · open source
A GPU-accelerated simulator where creatures made of particles sense, move, hunt and reproduce. Switch on mutations and watch evolution invent new forms on its own.
First prize · ALIFE 2024 Virtual Creatures CompetitionLive footage · microbes in the Hanging Garden · recorded in ALIEN 5
At a glance
of particles in real time. CUDA physics, Vulkan rendering, NVIDIA and AMD.
Together the networks form the nervous system of a creature. What each cell can do depends on its cell type:
Download
Version 5 · built every night from the develop branch
Version 4.12 for NVIDIA GPUs: alien-installer.msi
From particles to ecosystems
ALIEN aims to be a high-performance simulation platform for open questions of artificial life and is designed for open-ended evolution. At the same time, it is a playground for experimenting with digital worlds and exploring them without a specific goal.
ALIEN explores life not only as we know it but as it could be, on a digital instead of a carbon basis. Everything consists of particles that bond into elastic solids, flow as liquids, stick, tear and break. Nothing is scripted: every behavior emerges from their interaction, computed on the graphics card for millions of particles in real time.
Cells act as sensors, muscles, attackers, digestors, memory, communicators or constructors, and each one runs its own small neural network. Together they form the nervous system of a creature, which lets it control its movement, search for food and react to its surroundings.
A genome is a blueprint made of genes. Like DNA, it stores the information for building offspring: constructor cells read it and grow new creatures cell by cell. Replication from stored information, instead of copying the body itself, is what makes open-ended evolution possible. Design your own creatures in the genome editor, or let them emerge.
Energy circulates between cells, free particles and an optional external pool. Creatures have to graze, hunt and defend themselves, and selection arises from limited energy, predation and competition for space. Arms races, symbiosis and the stability of whole ecosystems can be observed over millions of time steps.
Mutations change neural networks, cell properties and the structure of genomes, and even the mutation rates can evolve. No external fitness function decides what survives. Lineages diverge and niches open without any further intervention. A long-term goal is to understand how complexity grows from simple building blocks, from prebiotic evolution to entire ecosystems.
AI agents · MCP
ALIEN has a built-in MCP server. Connect an AI agent and describe in plain language what you want. The agent then operates ALIEN for you: it creates worlds, designs creatures, changes parameters, runs experiments and checks the result with screenshots.
Set up an evolution experiment with twenty simple creatures that copy themselves. Run it for four hours and show me what has evolved.
read_documentationcreate_simulationcreate_seedrun_simulationtake_screenshotMany lineages have formed. Small creatures in many shapes and colors swarm between long strands. Here is a close-up:
Media
Winner of the ALIFE 2024 Virtual Creatures Competition. A world of identical, simple individuals gives rise to competing clades until niches and coexisting populations emerge.
Community
Share simulations and genomes in the browser, report bugs, propose features or improve the documentation, which is plain Markdown in resources/docs. For larger changes please start a thread in the discussion forum first.
About
The beginnings of ALIEN were described in a paper in 2008. Since then it has grown over five major versions from a CPU simulation into a GPU engine with ray traced rendering.
Initiated and mainly developed by Christian Heinemann, applied mathematician and software engineer, with the help of many contributors. Contact: info@alien-project.org