Bottom-up development of multicellular digital organisms

Abstract

How multicellular creatures can be developed from single cells into multicellular forms is a basic question in research into artificial life. In this paper, we propose a possible anser to that question by developing multicellular digital organisms from singe-cell digital organisms. We have done experiments on a computer. First we defined a model of a single-cell organism which has open-ended evolvability and a self-replicating mechanism, so these single-cell digital organisms can develop into multicellular creatures which have better adaptability than single-cell ones under certain environments. The phenomena of cellular differentiation and cell self-organization were observed during the development of the multicellular digital organisms.