2025/07/16 by Papadopoulos, Vassilis, Guichard, Etienne · 2 citations
#Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems (nlin.AO) #Cellular Automata and Lattice Gases (nlin.CG) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Neural and Evolutionary Computing (cs.NE)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2507.12306
We present Mass-Conserving Evolution (MaCE), a general method for implementing mass conservation in Cellular Automata (CA). MaCE is a simple evolution rule that can be easily 'attached' to existing CAs to make them mass-conserving, which tends to produce interesting behaviours more often, as patterns can no longer explode or die out. We first show that MaCE is numerically stable and admits a simple continuous limit. We then test MaCE on Lenia, and through several experiments, we demonstrate that it produces a wide variety of interesting behaviours, starting from the variety and abundance of solitons up to hints of intrinsic evolution in resource-constrained environments. Finally, we showcase the versatility of MaCE by applying it to Neural-CAs and discrete CAs, and discuss promising research directions opened up by this scheme.