Simulation Environment for Artificial Creatures

Abstract

Our research is focused on the design and simulation of artificial creatures – animates. This topic has been addressed in our research group for the last decade. The designed animates have been greatly inspired by sciences such as ethology, biology and psychology. Several agent architectures have been proposed and tested in recent years. We started to face the problem of comparing various architectures in order to benchmark them. Intelligence is embodied in our agent, and it needs an environment to be placed into. We have solved both these problems by first proposing and then implementing a common simulation environment in which these agents can run and compete. The main contribution of this paper is to offer a description of this designed simulation environment. It has been named the World of Artificial Life (WAL).