# Self-Reproduction and Evolution in Cellular Automata: 25 Years after Evoloops

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03961 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03961/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Flow-Lenia: Emergent evolutionary dynamics in mass conservative continuous cellular automata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08569/) (2025)
- [Serious Games: Human-AI Interaction, Evolution, and Coevolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16388/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Self-Replication: Detecting Distributed Selfhood in the Outlier Cellular Automaton](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08047/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The year of 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of evoloops, an evolutionary variant of Chris Langton's self-reproducing loops which proved constructively that Darwinian evolution of self-reproducing organisms by variation and natural selection is possible within deterministic cellular automata. Over the last few decades, this line of Artificial Life research has since undergone several important developments. Although it experienced a relative dormancy of activities for a while, the recent rise of interest in open-ended evolution and the success of continuous cellular automata models have brought researchers' attention back to how to make spatio-temporal patterns self-reproduce and evolve within spatially distributed computational media. This article provides a review of the relevant literature on this topic over the past 25 years and highlights the major accomplishments made so far, the challenges being faced, and promising future research directions.