Artificial life as an aid to astrobiology: Testing life seeking techniques

Searching for signatures of fossil or present life in our solar system requires autonomous devices capable of investigating remote locations with limited assistance from earth. Here, we use an artificial chemistry model to create spatially complex chemical environments. An autonomous experimentation technique based on evolutionary computation is then employed to explore these environments with the aim of discovering the chemical signature of small patches of biota present in the simulation space. In the highly abstracted environment considered, autonomous experimentation achieves fair to good predictions for locations with biological activity. We believe that artificially generated biospheres will be an important tool for developing the algorithms key to the search for life on Mars.