Reproduction, development, and individual interactions are essential topics in artificial life. The cellular automata, which can handle these in a composite way, is highly restricted in its form and behavior because it represents life as a pattern of cells. In contrast, the virtual creatures proposed by Karl Sims have a very high degree of freedom in terms of morphology and behavior. However, they have limited expressive capacity in terms of those viewpoints. This study carefully extracts the characteristics of the cellular automata and Sims models to propose a new artificial life model that can simulate reproduction, development, and individual interactions while exhibiting high expressive power for morphology and behavior. The simulation was performed by sequentially reading a book with genetic information and repeatedly executing four actions: expansion, connection, disconnection, and transition. The virtual creatures in the proposed model exhibit unique survival strategies and lifestyles and acquire interesting properties in reproduction, development, and individual interactions while having freedom in morphology and behavior.

Artificial intelligence is often thought of as disembodied: a mind like a program, floating in a digital void. But human minds are deeply intertwined with our bodies -- and an experiment with virtual creatures performing tasks in simulated environments suggests that AI may benefit from having a mind-body setup. Stanford scientists were curious about the physical-mental interplay in our own evolution from blobs to tool-using apes. Could it be that the brain is influenced by the capabilities of the body, and vice versa? It has been suggested before -- over a century ago, in fact -- and certainly it's obvious that with a grasping hand one learns more quickly to manipulate objects than with a less differentiated appendage.

Steve Grand is currently teaching his children how to pee. Rather, he's teaching them to notice that mental niggle with which we're all familiar, the sense of a mounting pressure in some deep place that clues us to the fact that our bladder is full and we need to do something about it, quickly. Grand's children -- this current batch, at least -- have taken their father's name. The Grandroids, as they're known, are bug-eyed, quadrupedal animals. They look a bit like shaven dogs with giant octopus suckers for mouths (although that may radically change in the coming months).