getALife - An Artificial Life Environment for the Evaluation of Agent-Based Systems and Evolutionary Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning

An Artificial Life environment - getALife - is proposed, whose major aim is to provide a framework to evaluate single and multi-agent systems and evolutionary approaches to the development of reinforcement learning algorithms. The environment is based on a predator-prey scenario, with multiple species and where individuals are mainly characterized by their decision modules and genetic information.

The platform is quite powerful, flexible, modular, visually attractive, easy to program and to use, making an interesting tool both to research and teaching. Two applications based on getALife are provided: the evaluation of a Neural Network based decision module with evolutionary learning and the development of a children’s game.