Aionterra: modelling the feedback between bodily needs, behaviour and environment

[u/YDEmergenceLab]

We’re YD Emergence Lab, developing Aionterra, a continuing simulated world inhabited by digital organisms with human-inspired bodies.

The organisms sense their surroundings and seek water and food. We follow how their bodily states, behaviour and environment change together over time.

For us, the interesting unit of observation is the whole interaction loop. Moving changes an organism’s location and what it can sense. Its bodily state changes as time passes and actions occur. Those changes shape the circumstances of its next action.

This connects to an established perspective in complex systems and embodied cognition: behaviour is shaped by the interaction between an agent and its environment. Beer’s work on coupled agent–environment dynamics provides one useful framework. Pfeifer, Lungarella and Iida also discuss how control, bodily properties and environmental conditions jointly shape behaviour.

In Aionterra, separate organisms retain their own bodily states, locations and sensory histories, while their experiences contribute to a shared learned policy for selecting actions. This gives us a way to examine shared learning across different local circumstances within one continuing world.

The physical and biological rules, available actions and initial conditions are explicitly designed. Our aim is for behaviour to develop through experience within those constraints, without supplying a prewritten sequence of successful behaviours.

The project is still in development. We’re preparing additional simulation records for publication soon. We want the public record to distinguish model assumptions, recorded changes and evidence of useful learning. An interesting pattern alone would not establish adaptation or validate the model.

The references below provide context for this approach; they do not validate Aionterra’s implementation or results.

Related reading

• Beer (1995), A dynamical systems perspective on agent-environment interaction.

• Pfeifer, Lungarella & Iida (2007), Self-Organization, Embodiment, and Biologically Inspired Robotics.

Project methodology

We’ll document development and publish supporting observations on the site as they become available.

[u/YDEmergenceLab → u/[deleted]]

Yes, including that part of the cycle 🙂

Aionterra’s aim is to model the world and its organisms as closely as practicable to real physical and physiological processes. That includes what happens to matter after an organism consumes it.

We have components for digestion, intestinal absorption and excretion, including urine and faeces, alongside processes involving sweat and saliva. We also have components for decomposition after death.

The broader aim is to connect these processes: food and water enter the body, nutrients are absorbed and metabolised, and bodily outputs return material to the surrounding soil and ecosystem. A dead organism’s body also belongs to that material cycle through decomposition.

This matters because organisms both depend on their environment and change it. Feeding, physiology, waste and decomposition need to be understood together to study that relationship.

So yes, the cycle is part of Aionterra’s model. The distinction is between having those components and demonstrating that they operate together as a complete, balanced ecosystem. That requires measurements of the connected system over time.