[bjornsing]

> why can’t we put this to use producing alife simulations that deliver open-ended evolution?

Has it been tried? I’ve said for ages: show me a representation where a random bit flip generally results in a different but viable entity, and I’ll show you artificial life. The latent space of a VAE could well have those properties.

But it’s not open-ended though (in its obvious form) since the VAE would have to be trained on various complex life forms and will probably not extrapolate well outside the support of the training distribution.

[RaftPeople]

> show me a representation where a random bit flip generally results in a different but viable entity

It's a really interesting problem I pondered quite a bit when doing some a-life hobby stuff.

I never came up with a good solution, but you can kind of "feel" that the solution needs to be more analog-ish in the way info is represented. As you say, a small change in data (bit flip) probably needs to produce a small change in the resulting form. Possibly the binary representation points to a vector space of form "primitives" (drivers of form) such that adjacent points have similar form.

[svnt]

> But it’s not open-ended though (in its obvious form) since the VAE would have to be trained on various complex life forms and will probably not extrapolate well outside the support of the training distribution.

That is always the issue in alife: we discover processes that help us explore bounded information spaces, but only that.