In my case I'm doing it because I really enjoy thinking about representations of solutions that make evolutionary operators more effective - it was the topic of

In my case I'm doing it because I really enjoy thinking about representations of solutions that make evolutionary operators more effective - it was the topic of my masters thesis. This is more "pure" GA than alife though, mostly because alife was a bit too open-ended to structure a hypothesis around for a thesis, at least as far as I could figure out, so I had to compromise. Multi-world with migration between them was my PgDipSci thesis :) But I also really like the results that come out of alife in the broader sense, synthetic evolution, world/environment-building, and so on. It's quite a rich interesting field that's pretty easy to dabble in with some good ideas and some programming ability. As an aside, be aware that "genesys" is already taken in the field: http://web.cs.ucla.edu/~dyer/Papers/AlifeTracker/Alife91Jefferson.html http://web.cs.ucla.edu/~dyer/Papers/AlifeTracker/Alife91Jeff... (this is the HTML of the paper the thing I linked above is based on.) This may cause google-collisions.