A Description of a Simulation Environment and Neural Architecture for A-Life

This paper describes a project in progress, a modular environment for a-life experiments. The main purpose of the project is to design a neural architecture that would allow artificial creatures (biots) to learn to perform certain simple tasks within the environment, having to deal with only the information they can gather during exploration and semi-random trials. That means that the biots are given no explicit information about their position, distance from surrounding objects or even any measure of progress in a task. Information that a task has been started and either accomplished or failed is to be the only reinforcement passed to the learning process.