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We're thrilled to announce the 2025 Virtual Creatures Competition at ALIFE 2025 in Kyoto. In a world where the digital and biological realms converge, the significance of virtual creatures becomes increasingly profound.

Virtual creatures serve as digital pioneers, pushing the boundaries of creativity and innovation in artificial life. By simulating lifelike entities in a virtual environment, we gain invaluable insights into emergent behaviors, co-evolutionary dynamics, and the limitless possibilities of open-ended design.

This inclusive competition welcomes participants from all walks of life. Below, you'll find guidelines and inspirational themes for your submissions:

• Open-endedness

• Virtual creatures at multiple scales

• Emergence

• Co-evolution of brain and body

• Differentiable morphological optimization

• Evolving for less well-defined behaviors – i.e. novelty search, evolving for intrinsic motivations, etc.

Join us in shaping the future of virtual ecosystems at ALIFE 2025!

If you want to read more about the importance of virtual creatures, check out this article by Sam Kreigman: Why virtual creatures matter | Nature Machine Intelligence.