Using Video Games to Simulate Evolution

Discover the incredible (and hilarious) ways that video games can simulate evolution. From Conway’s ‘Game of Life’ to Evolution by Keiwan, we’ll look at how games and other simulations can reproduce natural selection.
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- Games and Simulations Featured -

Conway’s Game of Life:

Life Engine:

The Bibites:

Cute Mold:

Clusters:

Lenia:

Evolution by Keiwan:

Evol Pedal:

Swimming Soft-Bodied Creatures:

Evolving Soft-Bodied Animats:

Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures:

Accelerated Policy Learning with Parallel Differentiable Simulation:

Spore:

Adapt:

The Sapling:

Thrive:

OpenWorm:

This video is about evolution. Not the biological evolution you’re familiar with, where living organisms adapt to their environment. No, this is about virtual evolution. About discovering the extent to which video games, neural networks, and machine learning can shatter the natural order and let us experiment with the building blocks of life itself. …And the extent to which they can make us laugh.

The ambitious dream of using computers to simulate life dates back to Conway’s Game of Life, and you might be amazed at just how far the technology has come with games like Spore, Thrive, and Adapt.

So, for this entry into the archive, we’ll take natural selection into our own hands, and see how far we can push this concept before things get out of control...

0:00 Simulating Evolution
1:00 Dawn of Life
3:59 Cellular Models
6:09 Stepping onto Land
8:45 Machine Learning
11:12 The Dream of Spore
13:25 Biosphere Simulation
15:15 The Ultimate Game?
17:35 Unlimited Power
19:28 What Comes Next…

Copyright Disclaimer: Under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. All video/image content is edited under fair use rights for reasons of commentary.

I do not own the images, music, or footage used in this video. All rights and credit goes to the original owners.

♫ Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio:
Mysterious Green Fluid, Sanity Unravels, Haddonfield Horror, Alone in the Dark, Dusk, The Witch, The Vanishing, Tenebrae, The Guardian

Beauty Flow
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

♫ Classical Music:
Requiem 1 Giuseppe Verdi - Dies irae
Mozart - Requiem - Dies irae

[purplehaze]

EvoSims are just.. so mesmerizing to watch. Seeing an entire virtual ecosystem come to life and evolve before your very eyes, in real time, is unspeakably satisfying.

[ackleackenkaker]

10:37
“Sometimes they succeed in tripping the AI up.”
Throws a 1/2 ton crate at it, proclaims victory.

[cadenlikespigs]

Imagine being in class and your teacher says, “Alright guys, today we are going to learn about evolution. Pull out your gaming setups.”

[superspider]

Another thing I want to mention about Thrive is that they've only just recently started taking tentative steps towards multicellular gameplay, it's fascinating to see this game that realistically should've only existed in the dreams of gamers slowly but surely coming to fruition

[YoungGandalf]

I knew it. Playing video games is the key to ensuring the future success of humanity.

[astick]

I would have never expected him to cover evolution simulators but it makes so much sense that he did

[ThrottleKitty]

I literally bought a gaming PC to play spore... I remember the strange feeling playing it, of being both profoundly disappointed given what I'd expected, yet still very much in love with the cute silly little game it was. To this day nothing has ever lived up to what I thought that game would be.

[coziosity]

11:12 - Spore! I remember it being 2008 (when iPhones were totally new) and yeah, the hype behind Spore was insane. I couldn't afford it so a friend gave me a pirated copy on a disc and I loved it but it definitely wasn't what I was expecting 😅

[AstroSamDev]

As a programmer, I have absolutely loved creating life simulations, along with neural networks. The ability to watch an ecosystem or species evolve, live, move, and learn, is absolutely wonderful. It's like watching millions of years of evolution go by in a few minutes or hours. It also shows parallels, with how even us people and the plants/animals around us are all just made of basic molecules, which just react to the things around them and move, which makes us able to do things.
Wonderful video, I love every one, keep up the great work CA! 👍

[maiszerc]

Imagine your simulated lifeform evolved so much that it realized it lives in a simulation

[silkmoth]

Just like you said in the ending, the future of this genre looks VERY big
I would go as far as to say that this kinda of game/experiment is what will really blend the line of "What is Life", like, not only intelligence and sentience, but all kinda of lifes in general

[pengil]

To me I’ve always wanted another more cartoony evolution sim like spore. I understand what games like Thrive are going for, it’s just that spore is fun, and it has charm.

[droopsmoop]

the soft bodied creatures at around 9:14 kinda looks like the in silico models they used in the making of the Xenobots, even with the contracting (heart muscle)/passive (epidermal) cells and the generally cube-y form. I wonder if the two projects are actually linked

[Dojoge]

evolution is so simple yet so complex at the same time

[espinas]

Now this, this is fascinating as hell! (This is nothing against the darker, more post-apocalyptic videos, but I mostly come to this channel for much more "natural" type content)

[Numbskulli]

Never been this early!!! Just wanted to say love your content, you’re the channel that first got me into speculative biology and I could never thank you enough.

[isaac]

10:37 They threw a whole man sized box towards that dude, ofc he got caught off guard.

Justice for boxdude.

[lunarsoul]

I remember watching a video by Wessel Stoop once (maker of The Sapling) and he said that one of the main reasons he made the game is because, while he liked Spore, it was a let-down, so he wanted to make a game that was more like what he wanted Spore to be.

[Blanch]

It never fails to amaze me how humanity has advanced to the point that we are basically creating whole artificial universes by simply using math and programming.

Life simulators will always have a soft spot in my heart. It’s always such an interesting and cool experience to watch these “organisms” evolve, prosper, reproduce, and eventually die. Really makes me appreciate the real world and the laws that created it a whole lot more by actually seeing it in action, even if it is just a game.

[dracodracarys]

if you're reviewing more spec evo stuff how about Tribbetherium's "Hamster's Paradise"? It's like Serina but with hamsters instead of canaries and we get stuff like lizard-like hamsters that fly with wings made of modified hair, or giant hamster mammoths called hammoths, and there's also a warmongering intelligent race of Skaven-like hamsters called Harmsters. it's some crazy stuff and a fun read