Artificial Life App Reviews

I love this game/toy. The survival mode is totally a game; you make some rules for your creature and see how long it survives against creatures with randomized rules. The simulation mode is like having an aquarium on your iphone; you watch hundreds of creatures with randomized rules look for food, run from predators, kill weaklings, mate, and impart half of their rulesbinto the offspring. Whereas the survival mode seems to be more of testing your ideas of what would be a good evolutionary strategy, the simulation is more of taking an interest in the individual creatures (or schools of relatives) and tapping on them to see what they are doing right. I like to play simulation mode and tap on a random creature to just watch it swim around for a while. Its intersting to me that the rules or "chromosomes" can survive for so long even if they dont seem efficient. This is one of those apps that you enjoy so much that you begin to come up with new features that would make it even more fun, its inspirational. Read the other reviews to see some great ways to make the app even more interesting, but have no doubt that its worth the dollar. Ive been wanting a game like this where I can easily create programs for digital creatures and watch them succeed or fail. This is (by far) the closest thing Ive found. I hope Artificial Life becomes its own genre of genetic strategy.

Since the new update, when you select a Protozoa the screen shakes like crazy.

I wish I would not have spent 99cents on this game. I love evolution and have enjoyed past "life" type games but this one doesnt make a lot of sense. The variables lack and the Protozoa do not show any noticeable change when changing variables. I do not recommend this game.

What you need in an update is to be able to select the things in a family like how many generations and also a gene like if the nearest hiding spot is xxx units away and the nearest protazoa is xxx units away then find a mate ect. I also think the tail is like power like Ill see one with a tail get attacked a couple of times but go on and live while ones with no tail die. Also the tail gets longer for howmany things its eaten/killed

While many of upgrades to statistics are great, the overall gameplay has suffered. Protozoa behave oddly, an often contrary to how they are programmed. For example, stated action is something like "go to nearest relative" yet the Protozoa hugs the wall when a relative is only a short distance away. I am also not a fan of the 50% life cost for mating. It was fine how it was in my opinion. What used to be my favorite game is now virtually unplayable. Would love to change this rating... Please fix!

Great potential but half the time in survival my chromosome just sits there literally not doing anything

Fun app. There are some problems though. Breeding is pointless. In survivability mode, it ends the instant the single protozoa you started with dies regardless of whether it has produced a hundred offspring or none at all. In the sandbox mode you can pick one and follow it, but again when that one dies, you lose all ties to it. You cant follow a family ofprotozoa in either mode. Therefore there is no point to breeding. The life span of a single unit is all youre ever able to look at. The protozoa dont want to go to the sun. I program the unit to go away from the sun if it gets too close and towards the sun if it gets too far away. Unfortunately, the speed it uses when going towards anything other than the sun is many times faster than the crawling speed it uses to go back the other way. Im not sure why this is, but the result is unit after unit eventually getting stranded way out in the middle of nowhere. Why are the speeds different? Why not just make it react the same to everything? If you want to reorder your chromosome list, you need to build it completely from scratch from each time. The interface needs some way of dragging and dropping or telling it to swap the order of two adjacent chromosomes or something. Anything would be better than having to reenter each line one at a time. Another good idea would be to allow copying and holding a complete chromosome list so you can transfer it from one protozoa to another. The logic is funny. If I decide to use only 5 chromosomes (for example) and I make the 6th chromosome some kind of catch all, it doesnt necessarily "catch all." Theres a behavioral difference between whether just the 6th line says "if my life > 0 find a mate" andthe 7th through the 10th are random other things and if the 6th through the 10thchromosomes all use the same "catch all" statement. It shouldnt make a difference, but it does.

No matter what i do the population is always at a minimum. The population is not self sustaining and thus nothing can happen. The population dont evolve they just change. Its a good idea but i think it needs more. The creator should read the book the smart swarm. The math this book talks about could be used to make a real colony.

Fun to play with, a true game of chance and skill. Needs: 1. Ability to delete old protozoa files. 2. Family line tracing for breeding. (Go to nearest relative after death in Sandbox) so that breeding has a purpose. 3. Breeding preference for similar colors a "consensual breeding (both protozoa must want to breed" in order to produce offspring, so that genome stability exists. 4. Gravity, sun, and speed sliders rather than a staggered slider.

No matter what I change my chromosomes to, they always avoid nearest organism, and then die.

I loved this game but ever since the update sandbox mode wont work! This is on a 3 rd gen iPod please fix!

Exceptional. Great for evolutionary studies. One of the top apps Ive purchased kudos guys.

Sandbox simulation just crashes the game.

Beautiful to watch, and mentally stimulating until you find the perfect combination of behaviors that results in a creature that never dies. Then the challenge is to tweak it until it makes a big family. I havent done that yet. So far, not dying = avoid the sun, eat nearby food, run toward food when predators are near, attack scavengers when you get hungry. The rest are just for fun, but I still dont have a big family. Let me know if you make a big family. The things that would make this app sell better are if you could compete organisms with other players, and if you could keep playing when you die if you still have family alive, like pick one of them to jump to. I dont ever play sandbox mode.

Best life simulator out there. Maybe the only one!

This app is awesome! The one thing I cant figure out is how to make a family.

I was expecting more. Lame.

Was an awesome app before iOS 7 and it is even better now!

Is awesome!

It clearly demonstrates evolution, heredity, and natural selection. Its fascinating, gorgeous, fun, and addictive! One of my favorite apps out there. :)