The EvCA Project is no longer active, although many other groups now work on evolving cellular automata. A simple web search will take you to these other projects. Nonetheless, this site continues to provide access to the work produced by the EvCA group.

The overall research done by the EvCA group was primarily motivated by the question: "How does evolution produce sophisticated emergent computation in systems composed of simple components limited to local interactions?" To find answers to this question, genetic algorithms were used to evolve cellular automata to perform computational tasks that require global information processing. In studying the results of these computer simulations, many more, related questions sprung up, ranging from questions about the relation between pattern formation and information processing to questions about population dynamics and coevolution. Follow the links in the list below to find out more about these research projects, and how they relate to each other.