biotaatlas

What is biota

biota searches the parameter space of Flow-Lenia - a continuous cellular automaton where matter is conserved by construction. Rather than finding a single best creature, it fills a behavioral grid where each cell holds the most compact creature with a particular phenotypic fingerprint. The result is a structured catalog of qualitatively distinct life-forms.

Each creature is a soliton: a stable, self-maintaining pattern that persists indefinitely given the right parameters. Mass conservation is what makes them viable across a wide parameter range - without it, most settings produce explosion or collapse within a few steps.

The search algorithm

MAP-Elites runs a loop: sample parameters, simulate a creature, measure its behavior, insert it into the matching archive cell if it beats whatever is already there. After thousands of rollouts the archive fills with creatures covering the behavioral space as broadly as possible - not optimizing toward one solution, but toward diversity.

Simulations run in parallel across a 3-node GPU cluster. One batch task evaluates B creatures as a single vectorized forward pass on one RTX 5060 Ti. The driver owns the archive and orchestrates the search; workers are stateless.

Behavioral descriptors

Three scalars measured from each rollout index the archive's three axes. All are empirically calibrated against real cluster runs, not derived from parameter values.

Further reading