Non-Platonic Autopoiesis of a Cellular Automaton Glider in Asymptotic Lenia

Abstract

Like Life, Lenia CA support a range of patterns that move, interact with their environment, and/or are modified by said interactions. These patterns maintain a cohesive, self-organizing morphology, i.e. they exemplify autopoiesis, the self-organization principle of a network of components and processes maintaining themselves. Recent work implementing Asymptotic Lenia as a reaction-diffusion system reported that non-Platonic behavior in standard Lenia may depend on the clipping function, and that ALenia gliders are likely not subject to non-Platonic instability. In this work I show an example of a glider in ALenia that depends on a certain simulation coarseness for autopoietic competence: when simulated with too fine spatial or temporal resolution the glider no longer maintains its morphology or dynamics. I also show that instability maps of the asymptotic Lenia glider, and others in different CA framworks, show fractal retention of fine boundary detail down to the limit of floating point precision.