How many bots can the dish support when new cells trickle in slowly? bot-count climbs from 8 to between 25 and 30 while the starting cells last, and pellet-count falls below 10.
Try this While it runs, lower kinematic-threshold from 6 to 3. Each birth costs half as many cells, so bots multiply faster and strip the dish of loose cells.
About this model Where it ends up
Xenobots are clusters of frog (Xenopus laevis) cells built to shapes designed in simulation. Kriegman, Blackiston, Levin and Bongard (PNAS 2020) evolved body plans that move by contracting heart-muscle cells. In 2021 they showed that swimming xenobots push loose stem cells into piles that mature into new xenobots, and called it kinematic self-replication.
This model keeps that loop and skips the physics. Each bot's speed pulses at actuation-frequency, and a fixed turning bias gives it a curved path. It absorbs any loose cell within 2 patches. After collecting kinematic-threshold cells it releases a new bot with a random gait. Bots die at age 500, and the dish is topped up with new cells up to the starting number. Nothing is piled up: collected cells go into a counter rather than a physical cluster.
Idea Sam Kriegman · Douglas Blackiston · Michael Levin · Josh Bongard
MathPets MathPets · org
