# Sakana AI — Petri Dish Neural Cellular Automata

- Company: Sakana AI (sakana.ai)
- Announced: 2025-11-04T15:00:00+00:00
- Category: research-paper
- Subject: Sakana models
- Source: https://sakana.ai/pd-nca
- Record: https://forck.live/items/4704-petri-dish-neural-cellular-automata

Sakana AI introduces Petri Dish Neural Cellular Automata (PD-NCA), a new ALife substrate where multiple neural cellular automata learn to self-replicate and grow via ongoing gradient descent, leading to complex emergent behaviors like cyclic dynamics, territorial defense, and spontaneous cooperation. The work was presented at ALIFE2025.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://sakana.ai/pd-nca:

> Our Petri Dish Neural Cellular Automata (PD-NCA) is a new ALife substrate that consists of a differentiable world where multiple NCA learn to self-replicate and grow via ongoing gradient descent. Every individual is constantly trying to grow, all the while learning to adapt and out-compete its neighbors.

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