The animat approach to Artificial Life has it origins in many of the excellent simulation systems build over recent years to explore the behaviour of "animals" or automata systems and their behaviours. These simulated animals or simplistic lifeforms can exist in a computer generated environment, can move around, consume resources and reproduce, and in some cases change the environment.
Recent work has used such systems to produce convincing demonstrations that under some circumstances animats can be considered "alive" at some level. Simulated environments and populations of evolving animats provides a convenient experimental framework for investigating emergent and collective behaviours of complex systems and also provides a quautitative basis for reasoning about what it means to be "alive".
Links to some of the better known animat simulation systems such as Tierra and Avida are given on our links page.
Some of the key issues for computer simulated animat agents areOur research programme aims are to consider these issues and explore the phase space of ALife-forms exisiting in such environments.