Introducing ASAL: Automating the Search for Artificial Life with Foundation Models sakana.ai/asal/ Artificial Life (ALife) research holds key insights that can transform and accelerate progress in AI. By speeding up ALife discovery with AI, we accelerate our understanding of emergence, evolution, and intelligence–core principles that can inspire the next generation of AI systems! We proudly collaborated with MIT, OpenAI, Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, and Ken Stanley on this exciting project. Full Paper (Website): pub.sakana.ai/asal/ Full Paper (arxiv): asal.sakana.ai/paper/ Code: github.com/SakanaAI/asal/ In this work, we propose a new algorithm called Automated Search for Artificial Life (“ASAL”) to automate the discovery of artificial life using vision-language foundation models. Instead of tediously hand-designing every tiny rule of an Alife simulation, simply describe the space of simulations to search over, and ASAL will automatically discover the most interesting and open-ended artificial lifeforms! Because of the generality of foundation models, ASAL can discover new lifeforms across a diverse range of seminal ALife simulations, including Boids, Particle Life, Game of Life, Lenia, and Neural Cellular Automata. ASAL even discovered novel cellular automata rules that are more open-ended and expressive than the original Conway’s Game of Life. We believe this new paradigm may reignite ALife research by overcoming the bottleneck of manually designed simulations, thus advancing beyond the limits of human ingenuity.