Urdar - an artificial ecology platform

Paper in proceeding, 2011

Cross-feeding interactions are a common feature of many microbial systems, such as colonies of E. coli grown on a single limiting resource. We have studied this phenomenon in Gerlee and Lundh (2010) from an abstract point of view by considering artificial organisms which metabolise binary strings from a shared environment. The organisms are represented as simple cellular automaton rules and the analog of energy in the system is an approximation of the Shannon entropy of the binary strings. Only organisms which increase the entropy of the transformed strings are allowed to replicate. This system exhibits a large degree of species diversity, which increases when the flow of binary strings into the system is reduced.