This paper presents Coralai, a framework for exploring diverse ecosystems of Neural Cellular Automata (NCA). Organisms in Coralai utilize modular, GPU-accelerated Taichi kernels to interact, enact environmental changes, and evolve through local survival, merging, and mutation operations implemented with HyperNEAT and PyTorch. We provide an exploratory experiment implementing physics inspired by slime mold behavior showcasing the emergence of competition between sessile and mobile organisms, cycles of resource depletion and recovery, and symbiosis between diverse organisms. We conclude by outlining future work to discover simulation parameters through measures of multi-scale complexity and diversity. Code for Coralai is available at https://github.com/aidanbx/coralai , video demos are available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL8IZQY02-8 .

翻译：本文提出Coralai，一个用于探索神经细胞自动机多样化生态系统的框架。Coralai中的生物体利用模块化、GPU加速的Taichi内核进行交互，实施环境改变，并通过基于HyperNEAT和PyTorch实现的局部生存、融合与突变操作进行演化。我们提供了一个探索性实验，该实验实现了受黏菌行为启发的物理机制，展示了固着生物与移动生物之间竞争的出现、资源耗竭与恢复的循环，以及多样化生物体之间的共生现象。最后，我们概述了未来工作方向，即通过多尺度复杂性与多样性的度量来探索仿真参数。Coralai的代码可在 https://github.com/aidanbx/coralai 获取，视频演示可在 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL8IZQY02-8 观看。